Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Peer Review

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Over a hundred published papers have had to be withdrawn because they turned out to be computer generated:

Labbé emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts — necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription publishers.

This sort of thing is why I pay no attention to warm mongers who tell me to publish in a peer reviewed journal. Peer review, to the degree that it’s done with any rigor at all, turned out to be “pal review” in climate science, as revealed by the CRU emails.

17 thoughts on “Peer Review”

  1. I don’t mean this to be a defense of anybody involved, but it reads like they’re conflating “subscription” with “peer review.” There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that most of these examples were peer reviewed, rather they were in unreviewed conference proceedings.

  3. ‘So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”’ – Michael Mann

    From the ClimateGate e-mails. Just a reminder of how the GWNs subverted the peer review process for their own ends.

    1. Do you know anything about the Climate Research scandal? That Hans von Storch resigned as a result of de Freitas allowing the Soon and Baliunas paper to be published? That the paper itself was a joke, with scientists cited in the paper have claimed that their data and results had been misrepresented?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy
      “The paper would count warm or wet conditions in one region from 800 to 850 and dry conditions in a separate region from 1200 to 1250 as both demonstrating the Medieval Warm period.”

      If you don’t believe my description of the paper, read it yourself:
      http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf

      1. Why on Earth should that be a flaw in the paper when the alarmists constantly publish papers predicting both an increase in wet conditions and floods due to global warming, accompanied by an increase in dry conditions and droughts due to global warming? Heck, publishing papers on “extreme weather events” that will be caused by global warming is almost a fad.

        But of course, warming can only cause these things in the future, not the past, because in climate science the past doesn’t operate via the same physical mechanisms as the future, for some mysterious reason. It upsets people. Enough to cause them to famously e-mail a journal’s editors and threaten them and their journal in they didn’t withdraw and denounce a paper. It was as if an iron curtain was descending on science journals everywhere, as the gatekeepers positioned themselves to cut off the funding of anyone who disagreed with their politically motivated dogma.

        1. The point is that the MWP must happen globally at the same time if you want it to stand well above the global temperatures before and after the MWP, it wasn’t so it didn’t, Soon and Baliunas try to conceal the different timing of short warm periods at different places between 850AD and 1250AD.
          God knows I’ve pointed this out to you several times with regard to the CO2 science site pulling the same trick.

          I’ll take your failure to defend the quality of the Soon and Baliunas paper as an acknowledgement of its “short comings” (to put it mildly).

        2. They got pretty much the same result as Ljundqvist 2012 (pdf), which concludes:

          The presently available palaeotemperature proxy data records do not support the assumption that late 20th century temperatures exceeded those of the MWP in most regions, although it is clear that the temperatures of the last few decades exceed those of any multidecadal period in the last 700–800 years. Previous conclusions (e.g., IPCC, 2007) in the opposite direction have either been based on too few proxy records or been based on instrumental temperatures spliced to the proxy reconstructions. It is also clear that temperature changes, on centennial time-scales, occurred rather coherently in all the investigated regions – Scandinavia, Siberia, Greenland, Central Europe, China, and North America – with data coverage to enable regional reconstructions. Large-scale patterns as the MWP, the LIA and the 20th century warming occur quite coherently in all the regional reconstructions presented here but both their relative and absolute amplitude are not always the same. Exceptional warming in the 10th century is seen in all six regional reconstructions. Assumptions that, in particular, the MWP was restricted to the North Atlantic region can be rejected.

          I’m guessing that Ljundqvist’s daughter will have her kneecaps broken by “the team” or something, because science!

  4. ‘Peer review’ has the typical flaws of any such scheme. Once you get to a certain point in research the number of people who can properly review your work are barely in the hundred. Its like small town syndrome. Even if it is double-blind people still have their own personal prejudices. As for lack of cross-referencing and fact checking it happens all the time. I mean I’ve had papers rejected for which I provided all the data and methods to the reviewers because the results didn’t fit some other prior publication which had results which were obviously wrong to anyone with basic knowledge of the field. Why? Reviewers are neither paid to do their job, nor they get a lot of time to do it. Reviews can go from brilliant to imbecile. Sometimes the most imbecile reviews come from the most reputed ‘experts’ in the field. That is the most troublesome aspect of it all.

    1. I think you hit upon the main problems, “the number of people who can properly review your work are barely in the hundred.” These people are all busy with their own work and research. Who has time to do a good job looking at other people’s work? And this, “Reviewers are neither paid to do their job, nor they get a lot of time to do it.” I am not sure what the incentives should be but altruism isn’t the best way to go considering humans and all.

  5. If this is happening in a physical science, you should all shudder to think what is going on the so-called
    social sciences and the inhumanities, where there are absolutely no standards whatsoever.

  6. Whenever the “gold standard” of a science has shifted from replication, indeed *multiple* replications that agreed with a published experiment, to “peer review”, this sort of thing began to rise. “Peer review” is properly nothing more than a bunch of people trying to cut down the size of the editor’s “slush pile”, while not tossing the baby out with the bath water. That is a good and laudable thing, but it is *by *no*means* an acceptable substitute for replication!

    Explicit recognition of the necessity of replication needs to be restored as the “gold standard” of the scientific method. Funding an experiment without replication gives us a “trust Journal-XXX” appeal to the world, and little more. IMHO, every funded project should have money set aside to at least help get replication started elsewhere, possibly by offering a bounty for the closest method to the original used in the replication.

    “I don’ wanna”, doesn’t count. “I’m too good to be seen cleaning up someone else’s mess”, isn’t good enough. “I can’t be bothered to raise the money for it” shouldn’t be listened to, either. Is this a heavy burden?

    Yes! It is the burden of the scientific method. Any institution that does not spend a substantial amount of its time on replication is slacking off science to chase after the publicity of “the next breakthrough”. That is ultimately money raising propaganda, not science.

  7. It’s hard to imagine that any publication could be taken in by a submittal that was generated by a computer. was generated by a computer. was generated by a computer. was generated by a computer
    ERR
    BREAK
    END

  8. On the subject of climate and Mann, Andew Bolt has threatened to sue over Mann’s tweet that Bolt is paid to lie, linking to a warmist parody site that pretends to be Bolt’s.

    Bring popcorn.

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