I'm not sure that's exactly the reason it's broken. Usually an editor will give a paper to people who are specialists on your topic, and they will have thus likely written papers related to the topic as well.

One major issue is that, because of this, they will sometimes have a vested interest (conscious or not) in blocking the publication of your paper if it shows flaws in their own.

Many journals I'm familiar with allow you to suggest referees, as well as suggest which researchers should be avoided as referees. If I'm publishing something that is competing in some sense with the work of other people, I will usually suggest to the editor to leave them out from the peer review process.

This has only been occasionally available in my experience, and itself introduces perhaps worse problems. If I'm explicitly arguing against someone's theory, they are likely to be a relevant judge of the merits/demerits of the arguments.

Having a good editor who can discern the difference between a reviewer's relevant responses and 'turf warfare' is probably best one can wish for.

And now you're ability to exclude reviewers is a significant factor in the acceptation of your paper... Not sure if this is really what we should whish for.

The quickest path towards realize peer review means almost nothing is... reading peer reviewed papers.

Of course, take my semi-anonymous random internet opinion with a grain of salt (I've dropped out of college not once, but _twice_, so what do I know?). However, I'm moderately good at computer science topics, and have spent the last year reading and implementing papers in detail in pursuit of a fairly niche topic, and, what I was dismayed to find, is that most papers are absolute, complete and utter garbage. Like, honesty embarrassing. And that's before you even get into the fact that _you can't reproduce their results_.

Encountering this has been something of a crisis in my entire belief system, to be honest. Although, maybe I've just been exposed to what "real" science looks like: a big, gross, often wrong mess of assumptions about the world that takes a long, long time to correct.

I suspect if you think this of most papers you've either stumbled into a really bad cluster, or you've missed something about the purpose of the papers you've read.

I would agree that some papers are terrible though, I've seen a few I would never have let through review including in the very top journals.

I like the Plos mega journal approach but we can't do away with peer review altogether otherwise what separates science from the conspiracy posts that circulate on Facebook ...

"From relevant authors" is such a cowardly review. Either give me the citation to the work you want me to cite or keep quiet.

So often as a reviewer I have avoided asking for citation of my own work, even if highly relevant, as I perceive that to be an abuse of power.

I've also started a comedic collection of terrible reviews I've received, though it took me 15 years to gain the confidence to know when these are an indication of the reviewer's failings, not mine.

> often as a reviewer I have avoided asking for citation of my own work, even if highly relevant, as I perceive that to be an abuse of power.

That's noble, but isn't it counter-productive? If you're reviewing a paper whose readers would ultimately benefit from a citation of your work, then would the paper not be improved by citing it?

Sure if it's worth breaching anonymity for. Last time this happened I recommended about 5 things one of which was mine. I guess it's the more borderline cases I lose sleep over.

I'm surprised that many people automatically assume "you should cite this paper" means "you should cite my paper". I tell reviewers to cite papers all the time. They're almost never my own papers. They're just relevant papers.

I think there is some aspect here of just finding reasons to dislike the reviewer (though I've certainly had reviewers where those reasons were pretty easy to find).

Agreed, I certainly don't think any request to cite X means the reviewer wrote it. But when there's a vague request to cite more without any indication of what (and sometimes a vague request to cite more on a rather niche topic tangential to the paper being reviewed) I would suspect the reviewer of trying to get their own work mentioned without saying so directly. Because if you know the field well enough to know what literature is missing, then it doesn't take you a moment to paste a couple of citations into your review.