Quote:
Originally Posted by biker1
In my field, the peer review process is pretty substantial. You can take a pretty good guess who will be reviewing your paper. They will typically be people working in the same area.
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Sounds like that would be pretty standard within any area of up-to-date science. Things have become quite specialized. What little actual info I've been able to access about the process suggests that the reviewer does the reviewing for free. Maybe that's how it must be, but from what I know about human nature, there's a fairly good chunk of us who might do less than stellar work under such circumstances, especially if there's a huge pile of more urgent stuff sitting on the desk. And, I *have* seen stuff published that was clearly "off" that had ostensibly been "peer reviewed". I suppose some areas of science are easier to fool and maybe some areas just have a different "culture".
BTW, another of my experiences was to have a discussion about this retraction thing with a newly Ph.D.'d microbiologist. I surmised that publications such as Science and Nature surely didn't have this retraction issue. She averred that the opposite was the case. :-(