I would not presume to talk about the value of peer review for all of science, but for some fields it is absolutely essential. I am a archaeologist, and we desperately need peer review to weed out papers by two groups of authors (many of whom can write scholarly-sounding and scholarly-looking papers). First we lunatics who would like to think they are part of the scholarly discipline. They are into Maya prophesies for 2012, boatloads of Egyptians who (supposedly) showed the Incas how to mummify the dead, phony pyramids in the Balkans, and the like. Some of these people write books and articles that appear to be scholarly, but are not. The second group is more insidious. These are scholars with valid degrees who have a very non-scientific epistemology, producing stories of the past with little plausibility. Taking a more humanities-oriented approach, they are willing to propose interpretations that the more scientifically-minded of us consider baseless speculation.
High-energy physics presumably has fewer lunatics and hangers-on than archaeology, and they are probably easier to spot. We desperately need peer review to keep some sort of sanity in our field. Mike Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution & Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 <http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120112/46aaeb3a/attachment.html
