Peer Review
Peer review is a central concept for most academic publishing; other scholars in a field must find a work sufficiently high in quality for it to merit publication. The process also guards against plagiarism.
Failures in peer review are sometimes scandalous. The Bogdanov Affair in theoretical physics is one example. The Sokal Affair is another, though this controversy also involved many other issues.
Rena Steinzor wrote:
Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as the editor of Philosophical Transaction's 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner's report of the first vaccination against smallpox.Read more about this topic: Academic Publishing
Famous quotes containing the words peer and/or review:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)