[HN Gopher] The early days of peer review: five insights from hi...
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The early days of peer review: five insights from historic reports
Author : rntn
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-10-16 12:32 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| For some reason Nature and Science never want to discuss the
| other side of peer review - not that involved publication of a
| paper, but that involved in accepting or rejecting government or
| other institutional funding proposals. Let's say the NIH
| announces $1 billion in funding for cancer-related research -
| surely the system that distributes these funds is worth a little
| scrutiny, and it also involves peer review.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Nature and Science regularly discuss these issues. For example,
| this article from this month:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03106-w
| swayvil wrote:
| To get primitive...
|
| Science translates observation into abstraction. (That's a big
| leap. And yes, one could make one's own observation. But nobody
| has the time for that.)
|
| But is it a good abstraction? (And then we have all these methods
| for ensuring that.)
|
| Also, why this implicit preference for abstraction? (Yes there's
| an upside. But consider the downside.)
| asdff wrote:
| Everything we experience is abstraction
| swayvil wrote:
| By abstraction I mean a contrivance of symbols (ie _things to
| which meaning is assigned_ ). Be those symbols ideas, words,
| patterns of magnetized dots or whatever.
|
| Sight, sound, taste, etc are not that.
|
| (I suppose even words are not necessarily symbols. I mean, if
| you don't assign meaning, if you don't interpret it that way,
| then a word is just a unique pattern of squiggles)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Intellectuals were writing letters explaining their findings(and
| asking for feedback) to each other and (math|royal|philosophical)
| societies all over Europe for 400+ years - shouldn't that count
| as an earlier form of peer review?
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| This used to be the view among professional historians of
| science 25 years ago, but the consensus now in the field is
| that it's anachronistic: it back-projects present day views of
| the scientific process onto the past, akin to looking at the
| first airplanes and calling then "an earlier form of the Boeing
| 747." Depending on who you ask, people will say modern peer
| review arose in the Cold War or at the earliest in the 19th
| century.
|
| See this encyclopedia entry for a short summary of the issues
| by a historian:
| https://ethos.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/38/
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Why on earth would someone not call the first airplanes an
| earlier form of the Boeing 747?
| throwaway19972 wrote:
| Perhaps because this wouldn't make sense in contexts where
| you're discussing what distinguishes the Boeing 747 from
| other planes. If you're comparing to, say, velocipedes, it
| makes a lot more sense.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The first airplanes are an earlier form of the airplane.
| The 747 is a later form of the airplane. That doesn't make
| the earlier airplanes an early form of the 747.
|
| In the same way, cats are a smaller form of a mammal, and
| giraffes are a larger form of a mammal. That doesn't make
| cats a smaller form of a giraffe.
| dleeftink wrote:
| I'll bite: what doesn't make cats a smaller form of a
| giraffe? We just have to squint a little on the spiney
| level
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The definition of giraffe is what makes a cat not a
| smaller form of giraffe. It has a definition, and the
| definition isn't just "thing with a spine" or even
| "mammal".
|
| From dictionary.com: "a tall, long-necked, spotted
| ruminant, Giraffa camelopardalis, of Africa: the tallest
| living quadruped animal."
|
| A cat does _not_ fit that definition, no matter how hard
| you squint.
| dogleash wrote:
| ITT: Hacker News reinvents taxonomy from first
| principles.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Why on earth would someone not call the first airplanes
| an earlier form of the Boeing 747?
|
| Because you need to draw the line somewhere reasonable.
|
| Otherwise, why don't we take your logic one step further
| and say an aluminum sheet is an earlier form of the Boeing
| 747 ?
|
| The difference between the Wright Brother's plane and a
| Boeing 747 is simply too enormous to be a logical "earlier
| form".
|
| The only thing the two share are the fundamental physics of
| aerodynamics. And even then, we are only talking the sort
| of shared aerodynamics you'll learn about at an aerospace
| museum on a school trip when you get to put a piece of
| cardboard in a wind tunnel.
|
| Its a bit like saying a donkey is an earlier form of a car.
| Well, sure, people used to use donkeys extensively for
| transport. But I think most people would agree calling it
| an earlier form of a car is pushing it.
| asdff wrote:
| Imagine you are on an archeologic excavation and you find a
| roman chariot. Would you call this an ancient Honda Civic?
| Hilift wrote:
| One of my neighbors conducted studies and published results
| for Lockheed in Georgia in the 1970's. This was during the
| development of very large transport aircraft, and solving the
| associated aerospace challenges. Those studies was usually
| cross-checked and reviewed by another PHD at another base
| (Wright-Patterson). The available pool of potential reviewers
| would have been small, and the profession was insular (US and
| NATO scientists mostly). Also, no one had a football field
| size wind tunnel, and computers were primitive/non-existent
| for simulations. One of them included printed source code.
| https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA000431.pdf
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Current peer review is more adversarial.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Also, current peer review is a gateway to tenure,
| recognition, prestige, funding, influence... When you factor
| in that intellectuals are also, err, human, you get yourself
| a nice recipe for disaster.
|
| How many papers are actually replicable? How many are the
| result of citation cartels or outright fraud?
|
| I remember Shriram Krishnamurthi talking about artifact
| evaluation in papers [1]. I think that's a great initiative
| that should be adopted by all fields of science.
|
| --
|
| 1: https://artifact-eval.org/
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Ferlier says that the introduction of the standardized referee
| questions significantly reduced the amount of time and effort put
| in by reviewers. "There's really this understanding in the
| nineteenth century and very early twentieth century that the peer
| review is a real discussion," she says. "After that, it becomes a
| way of managing the influx of papers for the journal."
|
| Screw that. If you want me to put in the effort to read k pages
| of your conference or journal paper you better be prepared to
| read k papers of my review.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| When working in research my boss who was very accepted in the
| field was on many review committees, but I did lots of reviewing
| (for my failed PhD, "pre-scanning" etc.) - is this the case
| everywhere? The reviewers by name are not the people doing the
| actual reviews?
| etrautmann wrote:
| In neuroscience it was common for PIs to review with the help
| of one or two trainees. Typically not an outsourcing in my
| experience but I had good mentors and not everyone operated
| that way.
| asdff wrote:
| Its pretty common for the top tier research PIs to rest on
| their laurels a bit and let their sub PIs or post docs (even
| grad students) handle the work of writing up the grant
| proposals and even doing things like peer review on their
| behalf. These PIs basically exist to support the machine
| running under their name as they can secure way more grant
| money than if the lab were broken up.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > Doing things [...] on their behalf
|
| We train grad students to do reviews by having them do
| reviews under close supervision, yes. You say it like it's a
| bad thing.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| There are some little gems in the article, one emphasizes what a
| badass Turing was.
|
| As if it wasn't enough to essentially invent the field of
| theoretical computer science and save possibly millions of lives
| in the war, he then decided in 1952 to casually publish in the
| field of biology.
|
| He had no formal training in biology, and when peer reviewers
| including the grandson of Charles Darwin commented on his paper
| "Turing seems to have ignored both sets of comments" lol.
|
| Nevertheless the paper turned out to be groundbreaking and is
| still considered relevant today. Total badass.
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