Re:The Absurdity of Peer Review: What the Pandemic Revealed
by beagle3 on Monday June 07, 2021 @04:18AM
(#27420264)
Peer review definitely could and should have caught the fake data in this case - there were too many implausible things about this paper that one could verify with a google search and see cannot be right.
In fact, it took people about one day from publication to start pointing them out with proof - and these people were (supposedly) less qualified than the peer reviewers.
It is true that, with properly faked data, a reviewer cannot be expected to catch it. Nor can p-hacking generally be discovered from an incomplete description.
But quite a bit of faked and even p-hacked data is less-than-competently done in a way that a reviewer can and should be able to catch;
And observational data or meta-study are much easier to verify, since no experiment was done by the researcher either.
In fact, it took people about one day from publication to start pointing them out with proof - and these people were (supposedly) less qualified than the peer reviewers.
It is true that, with properly faked data, a reviewer cannot be expected to catch it. Nor can p-hacking generally be discovered from an incomplete description.
But quite a bit of faked and even p-hacked data is less-than-competently done in a way that a reviewer can and should be able to catch;
And observational data or meta-study are much easier to verify, since no experiment was done by the researcher either.