I have gone down the rabbit hole of engineering research before and 90% of the time I’ve managed to find an anecdote or subsequent research footnotes or actual subsequent research publications, that substantially invalidated the lofty claims of the engineers in the 70s or 80s (which is amazing still despite this, a genuine treasure trove of research unused and sometimes useful aerospace engineering research and development) and unfortunately outside the few proper publications, a lot of the invalidations are not properly reverse cited research material and I could have spent a week cross referencing before I spot the link and realise the unnamed work they are saying they are proving wrong is actually some footnotes containing the only published data (before their new paper) on some old work that has a bad scan copy on the NASA NTRS server under some obscure title and no related keywords to the topic the research is notionally about…
Academic research can genuinely suck sometimes… particularly when you want to actually apply it.
A research assistant would quickly be thrown out if he/she refused to record negative experimental results, yet we somehow decide that is fine when operating as a collective.
In my experience, scientists ate comfortably cynical about peer review- even those that serve as reviewers and editors- except maybe junior scientists that haven’t gotten burned yet.
One simple example, (from memory) the Bard paper doesn't include results for experiments in which GPT-4 outperforms it. As a result, people come away from these works with an inflated understanding of their capabilities. This wouldn't pass peer review.
High Sales = A large number of people can attest to the engineered good or service being of high enough quality that they will exchange hard earned money for the ability to use it.
Peer Review = Some folks who derive self-worth from citations ask you to add a citation to their work and you do it because you'll probably need to ask them for the same some time later.
Market success isn't the same thing as validity.
Look at it like this: a Peer Reviewed (tm) article comes out saying "Foos cannot Bar, it is impossible". The same day, Apple releases "Bar for Foos, $8/month". Over the next year you see media outlets discussing how well Foo Barring works. Online reviewers talk about how they've incorporated Barring their Foos into everyday life and it has benefitted them in all these great ways. Your colleagues at work mention their fruitful Foo Barring adventure over the past weekend. Routine posts on HN come up where hackers describe how they've incorporated the Foo Barring API's into their own products in some novel way.
Your mother then calls you up to ask if she should get involved with this new Foo Barring thing. What do you say, can Foos Bar?
Grifters don't win in the long-term.
Plenty of religions suggest otherwise.
(Dear reader: I'm not referring to your religion - I'm referring to the other religions.)
> Butt-candling[1] must work, just look all these happy customers!
But history is replete with ineffective or downright harmful treatments being popular long after the evidence showed them to be ineffective or harmful. Homeopathy is a prime example of this, seeing as those concoctions contain either no active ingredients or (in cases of low dilutions still labeled "homeopathic") contain ingredients picked based on notions of sympathetic magic ("like cures like").
[1] A hopefully fictional example.
It's only in academia that they must instead work in a sterile environment that some person who has never stepped foot off a school campus thinks is "more authentic" for them to be seen as legitimate.
The point I make is that peer review can not be guaranteed to 'fix' science in any way we might like. The Sokal Affair [1] has now been replicated repeatedly, including in peer reviewed journals. The most recent one even got quite cheeky and published it under the names "Sage Owens, Kal Avers-Lynde III" - Sokal III. [2] It always preys on the same weakness - bias confirmation.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[2] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/academic-journal-publish...
Initially we spent probably a few hours on a paper for peer review because we were relatively unfamiliar with the field but eventually I spent maybe a couple of hours doing the review. Wouldn't say peer review is a joke but it's definitely overrated by the public.
Funny enough, I see exactly the opposite. I've seen this in both reviews I've done and reviews I've received. Just this week I reviewed and saw one of my fellow reviewers write in their justifications: I am not familiar with X, but I am skeptical that the method can scale to a more complex application. Their weaknesses section was extremely generic and it was very clear they didn't understand the work. They gave a weak reject. In fact, when I first started reviewing, I was explicitly told to _only_ accept if I was confident that the work was good. So in my experience, the bias goes the other way that you are proposing.
Btw, I've even seen undergrads acting as reviewers. I was asked to review in in my first year of grad school. I don't think I was qualified then, but I was always a junior reviewer rather than a full so idk.
It's kinda funny. A journal doesn't make the product it sells (the papers that it copywrites). It doesn't pay for the service it performs ("vetting" and editing). And both of these would be done regardless of their existence. I can understand distribution, but that hasn't been useful for over a decade now. What even do these things do anymore?
(btw, I've seen profs delegate to undergrads. And it is quite common for post-docs AND grad students to be reviewers. Trust me, I am one)
Networking, mostly, in the sense that an article in a high impact journal has a higher probability to be integrated in citations networks. The fact that there is some gate keeping means that it’s valuable to be in rather than out, and that’s something you can use to get a position. Also, better journals (which are not necessarily the highest-impact ones) tend to have more thorough peer review (such as 3 reviewers by default instead of 1 or 2, editors who are not afraid to ask for more reviews if the 3 are not conclusive, etc).
> (btw, I've seen profs delegate to undergrads. And it is quite common for post-docs AND grad students to be reviewers. Trust me, I am one)
I am lucky not to have been in that situation when I was a student, and I did not delegate any further when I got the occasional review from the prof when I was a post-doc. But I am unfortunately not surprised.
What field are you in where post-docs aren't getting calls to review directly from the conference? I'm in ML and it isn't my advisor assigning me reviews, it is the conference.
They also tend to over-estimate the effect of peer review (often equating peer review with validity).
> If someone cares enough about the work to build on it, they will replicate it anyway. And in that case they have a good incentive to spend the effort. If that works this will indirectly support the original paper even if the following papers don't specifically replicate the original results. Though this part is much more problematic if the following experiments fail, then this will likely remain entirely unpublished.
It can also remain unpublished if other things did not work out, even if the results could be replicated. A half-fictional example: a team is working on a revolutionary new material to solve complicated engineering problems. They found a material that was synthesised by someone in the 1980s, published once and never reproduced, which they think could have the specific property they are after. So they synthesise it, and it turns out that the material exists, with the expected structure but not with the property they hoped. They aren’t going to write it up and publish it; they’re just going to scrap it and move on to the next candidate. Different teams might be doing the same thing at the same time, and nobody coming after them will have a clue.