Tinker, Tailor, Publisher, Spy
17th May 2024
Publication of research results, theoretical propositions and scholarly essays is not a free-for-all. As shown by the dogmatism around climate change and Covid-19, sceptics struggle to get papers in print. The gatekeeper is the peer-review system, which people take for granted as a screening process to ensure rigour in scientific literature.
But it has not always been that way. Until at least the 1950s, the decision to publish was made by the editors of academic journals, who were typically eminent professors in their field. Peer review, by contrast, entails the editor sending an anonymised manuscript to independent reviewers, and although the editor makes a final decision, the reviews indicate whether the submission should be accepted, revised or rejected. This may seem fair and objective, but in reality peer review has become a means of knowledge control – and as we argue here, perhaps that was always the purpose.
‘Peer-reviewed’ is typically better than ‘non-peer-reviewed’, but not my much. The number of such papers that eventually wind up retracted doesn’t fill one with any confidence. The same problem shows up in The News all the time–nothing is more common than the click-bait headline ‘X LINKED TO Y’, the obvious insinuation that there is some causal link which they have to hint at because (wait for it) CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. (Unfortunately, when causation is unknown, sometimes correlation is all you have to work with.)