Friday, November 14, 2008

"most peer-reviewed published science is useless rubbish"

It seems that Marc Hendrickx's criticism of the peer review system has struck a cord with at least one of the Sydney Morning Herald's readers. Letter writer Jon Jenkins makes the following point:

From today's Sydney Morning Herald 15/11/2008:

"The system of peer review in science has become corrupted, with rorts such as rampant cross-authoring (putting names of non-contributing colleagues on papers to build their CVs) and "coffee time" agreements to approve each other's works.
Almost all grants, funding, pay, promotions and accolades are as a result of numbers of papers published. A far more useful statistic would be the number of citations, a measure of the work's usefulness.
As stunning as it is that most published papers are found to be false within five years, two other statistics are even more blunt: 50 per cent of publications are never read by anyone, and 95 per cent of peer-reviewed science is never cited, other than by the authors themselves.
In other words, most peer-reviewed published science is useless rubbish. "

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/letters/when-it-comes-to-trains-make-ours-a-double/2008/11/14/1226318921706.html

Hard to agrue with those figures Jon, but were they peer reviewed?

3 comments:

JoNova said...

Very pertinent statistics.

Everyone wants the shortcut so they don't have to think for themselves.

Well put!

JoNova said...

Very pertinent statistics.

Everyone wants the shortcut so they don't have to think for themselves.

Well put!

JoNova said...

Very pertinent statistics.

Everyone wants the shortcut so they don't have to think for themselves.

Well put!