Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 1. Opinion and Conjecture on the Effectiveness of Refereeing

Peer review is so much a part of the fabric of scholarly inquiry that it is often taken for granted. I have written many essays over the years that are directly or indirectly related to peer review. These include several on authorshipl-~ and editing, ~ faculty evaluation, ~ identifying Nobel-class science through citation analysis~-~—and even a few on various aspects of refereeing itself. l~lz But I have never before discussed the intricacies of the system in detail. Since the subject is central to scholarly life, we have decided to devote a three-part essay in Current ConterrtR to it. The first two parts will cover refereeing for publication. Part 1 examines how the refereeing system works and lists some of the common opinions about its advantages and disadvantages. Part 2 will cover scientific studies of refereeing and some proposed alternatives to the present system. Part 3 will follow later and will focus on the peer review of grant proposals. Note that I distinguish between a re~eree (one who evaluates an article before it is published) and a reviewer (one who evaluates already published material or, in the case of grant reviews, research-grant proposals). I generally use the term referee to mean one who advises editors on the publishability of a scholarly manuscript. The process by which this advice is solicited I usually call refereeing, but occasionally reviewAugust 4, 1986