Favorite Quotes
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ====
Nov - 15
Dec - 19
Jan - 21
Feb - 7
Mar -
Who watches the watchers? – more on peer review
4 Feb2010
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I received many interesting comments on my rant about peer review yesterday. I admit that I was angry that a relatively important article got savaged by reviewers who I thought were a bit too picky and missed the value of the paper.
I still worry about the question posed above. We all know too many examples of peer review failing. Reviewers come with biases, and those biases can hinder publications.
Amazingly this article came through on twitter this morning – I’m a believer.
The process of science for the last three hundred and more years is based on peer review. Other scientists check your work and say yup, that looks OK or no, you need to do this other experiment or read these papers. Unfortunately some reviewers (and I stress, these people are peers, that is they are your equals; not some shadowy cabal curating or judging Science from on high) do seem to hold personal grudges, or have strange agendas, or simply not be very good. (And yes, sometimes your own work is pants and should be rejected. Deal with it.)
This leads to people making wide-ranging and inflammatory statements such as “peer review is broken.” Some of them even write letters about it (as reported by the Beeb, six months later). This leads to calls for making the peer review process ‘open‘; i.e. publishing the correspondence between the reviewers and the editors, and maybe even removing the anonymity part.
Peer review, while it does have some advantages, still has significant flaws. Peer review can help but it can do great damage.
I do think we can do better. We can advance science in different ways than our current system.
Who reviews the reviewers?
Related posts:
- Does peer review help medicine?
- More criticism on peer review
- Does peer review work?
- Can expert panels improve health care?
- The process of care – lessons from Gawande and Saban
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- In: Medical Rants