Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?
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Today, Einstein’s papers would be sent to some total nonentity at Podunk U, who, being completely incapable of understanding important new ideas, would reject the papers for publication. “Peer” review is very unlikely to be peer review for the Einsteins of the world. We have a scientific social system in which intellectual pygmies are standing in judgment of giants.
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Philip Anderson, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics opines that “in the early part of the postwar [post-WWII] period [a scientist’s] career was science-driven, motivated mostly by absorption with the great enterprise of discovery, and by genuine curiosity as to how nature operates. By the last decade of the century far too many, especially of the young people, were seeing science as a competitive interpersonal game, in which the winner was not the one who was objectively right as [to] the nature of scientific reality, but the one who was successful at getting grants, publishing in Physical Review Letters, and being noticed in the news pages of Nature, Science, or Physics Today....
http://www.iscid.org/papers/Tipler_PeerReview_070103.pdf
I think Tipler is correct that the peer-review process via refereed journals is deeply flawed and serves as much to simply enforce orthodoxy as to insure quality. He gives many good examples to back up his point.
Edited by randman, : No reason given.
Edited by randman, : No reason given.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Changed topic title from "a harsh word on peer-review....good article" to "Refereed (peer reviewed) Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?" Also fixed some odd line breaks.