The Maritime Economist Magazine Spring 2015 | Page 45

THEMARITIME Economist skeptic & heterodox The peer review mechanism and scientific journalism are broadly established in the last century. In contrast to common assumption about scientific evolution, the practice of editorial peer reviewing did not become general before World War II (Burnham, 1990). In addition to several benefits of peer review process (thought to be irrefutable mechanism of ‘scientific’ journalism), there are also handicaps which may threaten the future of science. The peer review process may suppress anti-thesis against mainstream perspectives. In another story, Richard Smith (2006) tells us an interesting experience: Richard Horton (2000), editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, once said: The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than just a crude means of discovering the acceptability – not the validity – of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong. (An error also attracts other scholars to criticize and cite the me ntioned paper, the journal gains enormous volume of citations!) Respectfully. There is a huge submission volume to academic journals with vast number of poor written papers. It is obvious that today’s scientific world is not same as a century ago. From this perspective, peer review process is essential for handling submissions. It is not only an intellectual problem, but it has also a slot allocation side since each journal has a capacity of publishing papers based on publisher’s financial perspective. Even when there is an abundance of capacity (e.g. electronic publishing), impact factor is another dimension of paper selection process. Therefore, quantity of papers does not imply quality of them. However, quantity of citations really matters, and these days, impact factor engineering through several ways is an emerging debate of scientific society. As Goodhart’s law indicates: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Apart from technical and/or financial aspects, editors need to pay attention to the potential of inhibiting thought provoking, change-making and innovative research based on its incoherency with the mainstream. ME Mag According to Kennefick (2005), only a single paper of Albert Einstein’s over 300 papers was subject to peer review (with co-author, Nathan Rosen), and the review report was negative. Then, Einstein replied to editor as follows: Dear Sir, We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the -in any case erroneous- comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere. I remember feeling the effect strongly when as a young editor I had to consider a paper submitted to the BMJ by Karl Popper. I was unimpressed and thought we should reject the paper. But we could not. The power of the name was too strong. So we published, and time has shown we were right to do so. The paper argued that we should pay much more attention to error in medicine… 45