How many people here have been involved in a peer-reviewed paper?

Question

A lot of people discuss peer review, but from the comments it isn't clear that there are very many people here who have actually submitted a paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, been a referee for such a paper, much less been an editor for a journal. Has anyone besides pegminer (who I know has done at least one of the things listed above) been involved with the peer-review process in a professional capacity? Or are you all just talking about what you think the process entails without any first-hand experience?

Additional Details

Interesting. But all of the people who say they have some direct experience (so far anyway) are not the ones with the most violent opposition to it. It's only people who know nothing about it from first-hand experience who object to it. Let's see who else weighs in.

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

Even by his standards jello's answers is a pretty empty rant and James seems to be in some alternate universe, to be honest I don't which is sillier his comment or that 7 others gave it a thumbs up.
If medical peer review is "virtually forbidden" perhaps he can explain the "The Lancet" the best known peer reviewed medical journal in the world started in 1823.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet
There are also many others
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) - 1883
British Medical Journal (BMJ)
Peer review was in use by the medical profession well before most of the rest of science, as usual james seems to be just 'makin stuff up'

One of my jobs is preparing papers for publication, proof reading I also do most of the graphics for the ~6 scientists I work with, as the holder of the corporate credit card in my area I also pay the publication fees having done this for some 20 years, with redrafts, corrections and error corrections to get a paper published I'm quite familiar with the process.
We submit to journals like GRL and JASTP and occasionally Nature.
comments like jellos

"Like minded people miss common issues because they think too much a like. Why are people scared to get reviewed by other science disciplines and other view points'

Show pretty clearly he thinks of this in the same way as handing in a high school assignment, you get a mark and that's it.
It's nothing like that, after the prep work which can take months, then there is the the submission which again takes months with corrections and suggestion from the reviewers, this is (from what I have seen here) what those like jello think is the peer review, it is only the first part, if the paper is accepted it is the entire community that are the real peer reviewers, if a paper is widely read it is also referenced in other papers and either built on or disputed in following papers.

Answer 2

Peer review is worthless. You need other views to review your work, not just opinions of people that all ready agree with you.

Like minded people miss common issues because they think too much a like. Why are people scared to get reviewed by other science disciplines and other view points?

Answer 3

I have, and it's quite clear that most people using this "global warming" category don't understand what it is. They seem to think peer review is about making sure scientists fall into line and don't rock the boat. How idiotic.

I stumbled into this environmental subject area today, thinking it was part of the science and math section of Yahoo Answers. My mistake! This is just another two-bit opinion message board.

Answer 4

In grad school as a research assistant I was co-author on a paper which was eventually submitted for peer-review, but not until after I got my MS and left. It was a pretty cool project though - looking for buckyballs (carbon-60 molecules) in space. Didn't find any though - kind of a bummer. But hey, I got to take a trip to Mauna Kea and do a bunch of noise reduction and spectral analysis. Not a bad gig.

I don't think anyone who's been involved in the process would make the denier style arguments that it's a bunch of scientists automatically giving their buddies the nod, that it's a worthless measure, etc.

Answer 5

No. I witnessed a jury review in an architectural engineering class one time. Is it anything like that? They sure weren't patting each other on the back.

To bad we don't have peer review here. Then we could squelch all the dissenting opinions and get our one world environmental dictatorship. Darn.

I'm not a research scientist so I don't have the credentials to get anything published, let alone the credentials to review others' work.

Some people think they don't need credentials, maybe just a kitchen table experiment (James) or a good case of NPD (Jello).

Cowards who don't have the guts to put up or shut up. I know I'll never be as smart as an accomplished research scientist, so I'm willing to take them at their word; not brand them as liars and conspirators.

You can sue for defamation in the civil sphere; where is our "Science Court"?

Is it called "Peer Review"?

edit:

"Lets settle this once and for all". Except that we can't because we block any dissenting opinions. If peer review is bunk, why block all peers from answering? What's the risk? Oh, we only block people who are "disrespectful". Anyway, we can't be peers because we "all live in a trailer park" (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Apparently, there is no cure for NPD.

Answer 6

I have never been directly involved but I have several friends who have and they were not at all impressed. What I find most important is that in the field of medicine peer review is virtually forbidden and every new medicine or procedure most pass strict review through scientific method where several reviewers are able to obtain equivalent results independently through the double blind testing process which is central to the scientific method. And many in medicine still feel the testing of new drugs and surgical procedures needs to be made more strict than it is now.

So in the medical community they are looking for ways to improve on even the scientific method through making the testing more rigorous and those who claim to be climate scientists are working to make testing non existent because its results conflict with their political aspirations. I say all papers relating to climate science should be subjected to testing at least as severe as that for medicines is now.

Answer 7

Not directly, but I have supported two individuals who have. That's has to be worth something? Bottom line the process has a major stress factor, one I wish to avoid. I'm not talking about open online peer review such as Wikipedia either. http://www.physics.byu.edu/Graduate/thes…

Answer 8

I've done all three. Although most of my publications were not in peer-reviewed journals,, I probably have more of them than 90% of the people using Y!A. I've been asked to comment on a few submissions by almost as many editors. And I have edited publications, both scientific and non-scientific, paid and unpaid.

Answer 9

I've been through the process with two papers in stats. I don't know how different the process is in other fields, probably not much. The only problem that I see is that if I wrote a statistics paper that dealt with neurology, the peer-review process would not really catch any mistakes I made in reference to neurology, only statistics. The question as to whether or not climatology peer-review will catch mistakes given the large number of areas climatology covers would definately be up for debate and depend on the expertise of the person doing the peer-review.

Myself, I don't denegrate their peer-review process, I just state that the science is not settled. The science is settled, when we have a strong enough understanding of what affects the environment to make models which accurately predict future weather. Until this is done, any honest climatologist would have to admit that our understanding is not great enough to call the science settled or to place any certainty upon our conclusions.

Also one should realize that in all fields, the popular idea of the time in the field is the one that will be published more often. Politics and funding do play a factor, whether we like to admit it or not. In addition, scientists are usually given license to make predictions or state ideas that would really be areas of future research at the end that are not necessarily supported by their data. You need to be careful when reading the conclusions.

Edit:
You all are misreading and misquoting James E points. If you have gone through the peer review process and a New drug application to the FDA as I have, you would know that the New drug application is far more stringent. If you have done a complicated model in your paper, I can guarantee that the reviewer will not try to duplicate your work. I can also guarantee that anything you do in the way of analysis will not only be duplicated prior to going to the FDA, but will be checked again by the FDA.
Now I do disagree with James E, because requiring such stringency would nearly eliminate anything being published in any area. The standard for new drugs is so high that it takes a decade to get through the entire process. But I do find it entertaining that people denegrate the FDA process, while praising the accuracy of peer-reviewed article that have gone through much less testing and review.
And Pegminer, James E is correct all new medications must go through the FDA and 2 double blind independent tests; They do not go through the peer review process and the peer review process is not stringent enough to stake people's lives on. The medical journals all use the peer review process, but the medical journals are not the people who authorize drugs to be marketed.

Answer 10

Papers of mine have been published.

EDIT

James E <<What I find most important is that in the field of medicine peer review is virtually forbidden >>

Every day this guy amazes me more and more!!!!!

EDIT

<< all of the people who say they have some direct experience (so far anyway) are not the ones with the most violent opposition to it. It's only people who know nothing about it from first-hand experience who object to it>>

While I am not in violent opposition like the Deniers--they are just crazy (indeed it seems like they think "peer review" means having your friends decide)-- I have a pretty negative view of it.

When you give people unchecked authority they often become unreasonable. I've seen the same thing with PhD qualifier committees.

I'm not sure there is much that can be done to improve the situation, and , I think the opposite alternative of letting journals be like yahoo message boards would be way worse.

Probably the only things that can be done is to require that referees not be anonymous (in court cases, judges, and I think jurors, are not anonymous) and to sanction referees who make mistakes or are otherwise unfair. I understand the arguments for anonymous referees, but I think the reasons for them to not be anonymous are stronger.

Answer 11

You might say I was involved in peer review, but we never published: Things like nuclear power plant design, being checked by other engineers.

Answer 12

I have submitted for peer-review, have reviewed, and have been associate editor of a journal.

Answer 13

I've peer-reviewed and been pee-reviewed. I corrected some papers and shot down some. Most of my papers got published with minor corrections; one I did not have time to deal with the complaints so I didn't get it published, although I thought I could have.

More of my written work was engineering reports that were checked internally by supervisors.

[James E continues to have fantasies about how scientists work which he attributes to 'friends'. He has a lot of friends -- are they all voices in his head?]

Answer 14

Ok, I'm not really supposed to answer, but I just can't resist. There is a fantasy, and it is just a fantasy, that if someone writes an article that would provide evidence against anthropogenic global warming then it will be rejected out-of-hand. This is nonsense. Why do I say this? Well, I haven't written all that many peer-reviewed articles, but two of them I was co-author on presented ideas that were much much more controversial than anything to do with climate change. We did have to fight our way through peer review, and even switched journals (Nature to Physics of Plasma, and ? to Foundations of Physics), but the articles were published. My co-author has gone on to publish dozens of equally controversial articles.

Note that peer review doesn't replace the scientific method, it enhances it. It is important that conclusions be checked and results validated by other researchers. Once an article appears in a journal it is out there for anyone to look at, critique, and try to reproduce. It will often be found that mistakes may have been made, or other sources of error are found in experiments. Peer review is one step in the scientific method, ideally it weeds out obviously flawed results before they are published, so that when other researchers attempt to reproduce results they don't waste their time trying to reproduce garbage.

I'd love for James E to name those medical journals that don't use peer review.

Answer 15

In my undergraduate days (really not that long ago) I was fortunate enough to land a job with LASP here in Boulder. Did some work mostly related to the MESSENGER mission (played a very minor role), and was able to get my name in on a less-than-groundbreaking publication. Interesting nonetheless.

Currently working with a professor of mine on some data gathered from the PHENIX project, so hope to add a line or two to my cv here in the next few years.

As far as Jello's question and the corresponding "answers" go, the post was too much for my brain to handle.

Answer 16

I have published papers as the lead author in the following peer reviewed journals:

Journal of Raman Spectroscopy
Molecular Physics
Macromolecules
Polymer Gels and Networks

My first papers were about halomethanes. All of my recent work is biopolymer spectroscopy. I have been a referee but I have not been involved as an editor for a journal. (My father was the editor for a literary journal and my PhD supervisor was the editor of a spectroscopy journal. I saw how much work and frustration is involved. I studiously avoid taking on that type of responsibility.)

I have also authored research grant proposals with a success rate > 50%. 10 years ago I received my first research grant for 8 K. 3 years ago my grant proposals were over 100 K. Now the sums are much higher.