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(Medical Science) The Anti-peer review fiasco

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I can hardly say it's surprising that we now have this anti-peer-review fiasco given that we have seen:
  • Anti-Vaxxers
  • Anti-Ventilators
  • Creationists
  • Climate Change Denialists
  • Anti-evolutionists
  • Promoters of pseudoscience
  • HIV/AIDs Denialists
  • Anti-GMOs
  • People denying the risk of getting lung cancer via smoking
There appears to be a trend among some of the lay public that due to some criticisms in some science journals that they must all be wrong and nonsense, don't work, no longer reliable and should be thrown out. I want to make it clear here that this is not what the science experts are saying but it is what several members of the public who have erroneously concluded to be the case. One of the first problems I've noticed with the statement "peer review doesn't work" (mentioned in some of the lay press article headlines) is that it is the wrong scientific vocabulary to be used especially in the context of science. In fact, it would be very antiscientific to say that peer review is perfect and works. By the same token, scientists are not saying that peer review is useless (at least honest and good scientists anyway). Medicine is an imperfect science and so it follows that peer-review is imperfect and this isn't news by the way. I remember my own Doctor telling me once that the first thing they learn in medical school is that you can never say never or always.

However, there are things in medicine that are pretty solid now due to high degrees of evidential support obtained over decades of research. The effectiveness of the drug Prozac, for instance, was being studied in the early 1960s and it doesn't take a genius to work out this medication pretty solid for being effective for the treatment of depression and some anxiety disorders. But of course, we come across new things and more studies need to be done to find out about the results, then researchers need to review the research and cycle goes on.

Anyway, another thing I have noticed is that a number of people tend to love it when they come across scientists complaining about some of the peer-review journals as it confirms to their suspected beliefs that all peer-review is nonsense. one of the criticisms of peer-reviewed journals was written by Richard Smith in the JRSM. The original paper can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014107680609900414 (J R Soc Med 2006;99:178–182). This piece has lead to some confusion among some of the public. What's really interesting is what Dr. Davit Gorski said about this piece on Science-Based Medicine:


Is the peer review system a “sacred cow” that needs slaughtering?

All this brings me back to the title of this post, which is based on a quote from Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal (now The BMJ). Speaking at a Royal Society meeting in April, Smith characterized the peer review system as a “sacred cow” ready to “slaughtered.” As you can imagine, that particularly juicy quote went down quite well among those who are less than enamored with science-based medicine, such as Robert Scott Bell and, of course, Mike Adams’ minion Ethan Huff at NaturalNews.com, who twisted Smith’s quote to read ‘Sacred cow’ of industry science cult should be slaughtered for the good of humanity, BMJ editor says. Of course, what these accounts neglected to mention was that Smith made his quotes in the context of a debate with Georgina Mace, professor of biodiversity and ecosystems at University College London, with Smith taking the “anti-” position and Mace taking the “pro-.” Thus, it might not be surprising for each debater to take a more extreme position. For instance, Smith actually characterized John Ioannidis’ famous 2005 paper “Why most published research findings are false” as meaning that “most of what is published in journals is just plain wrong or nonsense,” which is clearly not what Ioannidis was saying. Just because something turns out to be incorrect does not make it nonsense in the context of the time, and, in fact, Ioannidis was making an argument that prior plausibility has to be taken into account in doing and interpreting research studies, which is a key argument for science-based medicine.
Still, Smith did make some good points, particularly when he described a BMJ experiment in which a brief paper was sent to 300 reviewers with eight deliberate errors introduced into it. No reviewer found more than five; the median was two, and 20% didn’t spot any. Of course, I would counter that this observation is not an indictment of peer review as a process, but rather evidence that BMJ under Smith’s editorship didn’t pick its peer reviewers very well and that peer review needs improvement. Perhaps, instead of scrapping peer review, we should work to improve it.(Dr. David H. Gorski, MD, PhD, FACS, https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-scientific-peer-review-a-sacred-cow-ready-to-be-slaughtered/)


In conclusion, as it stands Scientific peer-review is imperfect as medicine is an imperfect science. While there may still be room for improvement peer-review is not considered to be useless by most experts and is the best tool we have for analyzing scientific research currently at our disposal. Furthermore, continued vigilance needs to be in place for spotting fraudulent journals. Reference and further reading resources can be found at:
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