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Can Peer Reviewing Be A Logical Fallacy?

If there is a consensus, it is taken to be what is most likely to be true given the available data, and it is their duty to try to find out more information to either strengthen the consensus or overturn it with new data.
 



Actually, it wasn't wikileaks.. it was a newspaper, which has since apologised for misrepresenting the stolen emails. You really should stop lying.
 

Please provide example of the emails you're speaking of?
 
Simon W. Moon said:
The consensus changes. That's what science means--it changes.
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:lamo

That is the most hilarious statement I've ever read.

It's so supuper duper whooper funny that you need a f'n nose clip.
 
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Muhammed said:
There's thousands of them.

Just f'n google it .

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I'm not debating Google....You want to post up an email that you think offers evidence to you point...then do it. Otherwise, I accept your surrender.
 
Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !
Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better
this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is
trawling
them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear
there
is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than
send
to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within
20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.
We also
have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried
email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He
has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that
 
Simon W. Moon said:
ahh, so we venture into CT country.
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not at all, lots of really nasty crap can be done without actually "breaking" the law, though its doubtful there is a person alive who is not guilty of some level of conspiracy.
 
Anything run and conducted by human beings is subject to getting fracked up.
 

Truth is always being sought, and peer-reviewed and peer-criticized articles are both imperative.

But I would like to correct you on the meaning of "peer-reviewed," if I may. There are journals that are not peer-reviewed, so it's incorrect to say that "peer-reviewed means that it's been published in a professional journal. It means that it has been published by a juried/refereed/peer-reviewed professional publication.
 
Peer review is checking each other's work. Obviously, this is superior to not checking each other's work. Any work not at least checked by others is conjecture at best. But that this all began with someone trying to contest global warming doesn't surprise me. That argument always seems to involve trying to invalidate the scientific method itself.
 

it simply means that someone else agrees with the findings.

now what happens when all the peer reviewed/reviewers all get grants from the same source who just happens to fund their projects or the peer review would jeopardize the funding source in come way?
 

I would rephrase that to read "can be".

keep in mind P/F got screwed out of their cold fusion patents as a result of peer review mainly because they did not perform the 'exact' experiment and hot fusion was being subsidized at the time.
 
spazman56789 said:
I was wondering if Peer Reviewing can be a bunch logical fallacies? I know its important in fields of research to back up what the claim is, but can peer reviewing can be use as a type of Genetic Fallacy, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Belief?
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In a general sense, it could... but that would depend upon what's being reviewed and by whom. Moot however is quite correct on what peer review really means.
 
Peer review is a fraud.

Evidence: the history of science.

Don't know what I mean? Study the history of science.
 
Seven pages of comments and nobody points out the elephant in the room: There are not just opposing papers, there are opposing journals.

One discussant mentioned Stephen Hawking as an example, and he chose wisely by carefully picking an example that everybody recognizes as an authority. But is Mises recognized an authority by the referees employed at the Journal Post Keynesian Economics? Is Keynes recognized as an authority by the referees employed at the Review of Austrian Economics? In the eighty years since these two men first crossed swords, has even one person so much as read the opposing journal, much less been swayed by it?

What actually happens is that we get two (sometimes three or four) opposing camps that are big enough to have their own journals and then everybody settles into one camp or the other and spends the remainder of their career making snarky comments about those in the other camp. Anybody with an original idea is summarily ejected from both camps without his paper getting read beyond the first page to see if it is identifiable as being in the camp of the journal where it was submitted.

And people in both camps loudly boast of being "peer reviewed," as if that meant something.
 
Peer review is certainly a flawed process. However, it is better than whatever is in second place.
 
fmw said:
Peer review is certainly a flawed process. However, it is better than whatever is in second place.
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The alternative is Research Gate. And it is not in second place. It has over 7 million members, about 95% of all active scientists in the world.

But, if you are a global warming denier, I wouldn’t get too excited. Research Gate checks your credentials. You are not allowed to register unless you actually ARE a scientist and have documents to support that claim. Also, while there are no referees per se, it is self-policing in that any member can flag a problematic paper. I did: I caught someone plagiarizing off of someone else and brought this to the attention of the administrators. Plagiarist busted!


'Facebook for Scientists' Could Change Science Research For Good -- And For The Better

Researchers who have been caught fabricating data immediately come to the attention of Research Gate because they are such a huge network that they have contacts at every journal. In contrast, because traditional peer reviewed journals are so cloistered, they are often unaware that a paper they are reviewing has already been retracted elsewhere, which is why Retraction Watch was recently created. But even with Retraction Watch on guard, it is still generally true that Research Gate always knows about and bans papers with fake data while editors of traditional journals tend to ignore events at competing journals.

The Huffington Post article brings up another good point:

The researchers also share failed experiments, in order to prevent others from repeating their mistakes.
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Even if researchers are not fabricating their data, only “interesting” experiments are published in peer-reviewed journals. This creates a bias towards positive results just as much as outright fabrication does. A lot of negative data on medical treatments is tossed because failed experiments are considered uninteresting. But then one doctor who was simply lucky to have a bunch of patients with a strong will to live manages to publish a paper giving himself credit for his brilliant treatment program. I discuss this phenomenon in more detail here:

Scientific Method, Groundless Guesswork – Same Thing?
 

So you are suggesting that 95% of scientists either practice or desire an alternative to peer review? I mean peer review to back up scientific theories, not peer review to bust plagiarists.
 
fmw said:
So you are suggesting that 95% of scientists either practice or desire an alternative to peer review? I mean peer review to back up scientific theories, not peer review to bust plagiarists.
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You are using “peer reviewed” as though it were synonymous with “refereed.” Research Gate is peer reviewed because your peers – all seven million of them – review your paper. In a refereed journal, you only have to get past two out of three referees and, while you may not know their names, you know that they were hand-picked by the journal editor and this tells you a lot about them. It tells you how to write what they want to hear and, once you’ve got their stamp of approval, there is no direct method for the other seven million of your peers to criticize. Journals never publish papers critical of their own past papers and, generally, they are aware that their own houses are glass and so they do not throw rocks at the other journals’ past papers. So “peer reviewed” actually applies to Research Gate, not to the traditional refereed journals.

There are two primary reasons that academics post their papers at Research Gate rather than submit them to refereed journals:

1) Partisan Journals. Every journal has a core set of beliefs that differ significantly from those of competing journals. A lot of authors have simply refused to drink from the pitcher of Kool-Aid offered by any of the editors of journals in their field. And some of those who are capable of writing a 100% compliant paper have tired of preaching to the choir and simply want to contact people outside their own journal’s little echo chamber.

2) Time Delay. It takes a couple of years to get a paper published in a refereed journal. If the topic is a matter of intense debate among academics, an author will want his paper to be a part of that debate. Two years hence it will just be commentary on a debate that is already settled. (This is why research about ebola all went to Research Gate; half of Africa could be dead by the time research was published in traditional journals.) Also, while two years may not seem like a long time to a fifty-something professor that has settled into publishing at some partisan journal and has been singing their tune for the last 30 years, two years really is a long time to a twenty-something graduate student who must decide within months on a doctoral program.
 

So you resurrected this thread to promote yourself.
 
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