Within the scientific community, the peer-review process is widely held to be the gold standard of reliability and veracity, offering readers a degree of confidence lesser papers simply can’t muster.
And so last month when The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals, announced a promising COVID-19 treatment had been proven to be not only ineffective but also a danger to anyone taking it, the ramifications were swift and far-reaching.
Recall that U.S. President Donald Trump had earlier touted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential “game-changer” in the fight against COVID-19.
Hopeful early results set off a flurry of in-depth trials and investigations around the world. All that came to a screeching halt once The Lancet declared the drug to be a health hazard.
The World Health Organization and numerous other groups immediately halted their hydroxychloroquine research projects. Science had spoken.
Two weeks later, however, the paper was embarrassingly withdrawn because the data could not be verified, and may well be false. Given the stakes involved with a global pandemic, it’s one of the biggest scientific humiliations in recent memory.
Yet aside from the urgency of the subject matter, there’s nothing particularly novel about this turn of events. Grotesque errors occur with alarming regularity throughout the peer-reviewed academic press.
Any sense the process offers a guarantee of unimpeachable rigor and reliability is entirely misplaced. And the future is looking even shabbier for science’s tarnished gold standard.
Despite the common perception peer review entails numerous experts carefully poring over a study’s results to ensure its validity, the actual process is far less impressive.
Reviewers are typically scholars in the field expected to do the work for free. And they generally have time to give each paper only a cursory read to ensure it makes a novel and useful addition to existing literature.
While plenty of submitted papers are rejected by the peer-review process, it is not a system meant to catch egregious data errors or subterfuge.
A quick glance at the enormous data set compiled by Retraction Watch, which tracks retractions in academic journals, reveals there are numerous ways in which the peer-review process can fail.
Among the nearly 100 possible reasons listed are errors in data or analysis, plagiarism, misconduct, copyright violations, manipulation of results, irreproducible results, ethical violations, hoaxes, and outright fraud.
The daily stream of additions to Retraction Watch’s list of shame stands as a further testament to the inability of the peer-review process to catch underlying problems big or small.
Despite its outsized reputation, peer review is no guarantee of useful knowledge or truth.
This can only be approached through the conflict between competing theories and the relentless testing of other researchers’ results to laboriously weed out erroneous or false conclusions — what philosopher Karl Popper called a process of conjecture and refutation.
Unfortunately, even this elemental nature of scientific progress is now under assault thanks to a brand new flaw in the peer-review process — fealty to the mob.
Earlier this month chemistry professor Tomas Hudlicky of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., had a peer-reviewed article published in the prestigious German journal Angewandte Chemie.
It was a retrospective look at a groundbreaking 30-year-old paper on synthetic organic chemistry and a discussion of how the field had changed in the past three decades.
As such, it contained a few parenthetical thoughts from Hudlicky on recent administrative innovations, including now-omnipresent university policies regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion.
In a footnote, he opined that “These issues have influenced hiring practices to the point where the candidate’s inclusion in one of the preferred social groups may override his or her qualifications.”
Hudlicky’s premise that mandated preferential treatment for job candidates from unrepresented groups could impede efforts to hire the most meritorious candidate may be controversial to many, but it is certainly arguable.
Does not discriminate in favor of certain groups mathematically entail discrimination against others?
The existence of numerous academic positions advertised as being open exclusively to certain minority groups suggests as much.
What Hudlicky discovered, however, is that his position is no longer even contestable. Rather it is strictly forbidden.
Shocked that one of their own could express a heterodox opinion on the value of de rigueur equity, diversity and inclusion policies, chemistry professors around the world immediately demanded the paper be retracted.
Mob justice was swift. In an open letter to “our community” days after publication, the publisher of Angewandte Chemie announced it had suspended the two senior editors who handled the article and permanently removed from its list of experts the two peer reviewers involved.
The article was also expunged from its website. The publisher then pledged to assemble a “diverse group of external advisers” to thoroughly root out “the potential for discrimination and foster diversity at all levels” of the journal.
Not to be outdone, Brock’s provost also disowned Hudlicky in a press statement, calling his views “utterly at odds with the values” of the university; the school then drew attention to its own efforts to purge unconscious bias from its ranks and to further the goals of “accessibility, reconciliation, and decolonization.” (None of which have anything to do with synthetic organic chemistry, by the way.)
Brock’s knee-jerk criticism of Hudlicky is now also under review, following a formal complaint by another professor that the provost’s statement violates the school’s commitment to freedom of expression.
Hudlicky — who told Retraction Watch “the witch hunt is on” — clearly had the misfortune to make a few cranky comments at a time when putting heads on pikes is all the rage.
But what of the implications his situation entails for the entirety of the peer-review process?
Given the scorched earth treatment handed out to the editors and peer reviewers involved at Angewandte Chemie, the new marching orders for academic journals seem perfectly clear — peer reviewers are now expected to vet articles not just for coherence and relevance to the scientific field in question, but also for alignment with whatever political views may currently hold sway with the community-at-large.
If a publication-worthy paper comes across your desk that questions or undermines orthodox public opinion in any way — even in a footnote — and you approve it, your job may be forfeit. Conform or disappear.
If it is now forbidden to question whether preferential hiring practices can have an impact on merit, what else is beyond the pale for peer reviewers?
Consider all the other dearly held truths of our current cultural revolution regarding the value of Indigenous ways of knowing, the nature of gender and biology, climate change measurement, colonial history or the efficacy of pesticides and GMOs, the health risks of alcohol consumption.
Nearly every contentious topic has underlying social or political ramifications.
With moral purity inserted as a component to the internal processes for all academic publications, it will henceforth become impossible to pursue the vital schema of conjecture and refutation.
False theories will remain dogma simply because no one is allowed to challenge them.
How many new and potentially successful concepts or ideas will never see the light of day simply because peer reviewers decide to reject publication out of fear for their own reputation and livelihood?
Beyond the lamentable enforcement of conformity in academia through hiring practices and social pressure, now even the anonymous peer-review process may be perverted into active censorship of unpopular ideas.
For all its obvious flaws, peer review has endured because it offers challenging new ideas the opportunity to flourish or perish on their own merit in the open market of scientific inquiry.
If Galileo had the opportunity to submit his scandalously unpopular theory of planetary movement to some ancient journal of astronomy reviewed by his peers, rather than the Inquisition of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, would he still have had to recant? Perhaps not in 1633.
Today, however, he’d likely be burnt at the stake by the new guardians of the one true religion.
Read more at Financial Post
The “Peer review process”bears direct relationship with the mindset of the established church in past times: the relationship of a new idea to the established approved “norm”> Anything which goes against this is almost automatically rejected. Frederick Seizt wrote “In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as President of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events which led up to this IPCC report”. This was the IPCC Second Assessment. When politics and ideology drives supposed “impartial” and “objective” scientific theory,the conclusion is obvious. Heretics out, established orthodoxy in. The collective against the individual = conformity.
To quote Vladimir Lenin – useful idiots ready to testify. It seems to have an independent mind is alien to the world today.