Peer Review Scandals

[C. Gloster]

On July 18th, 2014, C. Gloster sent:
|-------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"It is dubious to claim that being approved by reviewers should not|
|involve replication."                                              |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------|

On July 18th, 2014, David Wojick sent:
|-----------------------------|
|"This is a common confusion."|
|-----------------------------|

Really?

|-------------------------------------------------|
|" A typical peer review takes a few hours because|
|it just involves reading the paper."             |
|-------------------------------------------------|

Peer review involves reading something which was submitted to a
funding agency. Refereeing involves reading something which was
submitted to a journal. Were you confused as to what peer review is?

Typical peer reviewing or refereeing should not take only a few
hours. Your responses that things are the way they are therefore
things are the way that they should be is baloney. So-called science
is severely broken.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|" The primary objective is to say whether                             |
|the results are important enough to publish in the reviewing journal."|
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

This thread was started as a result of referees not even checking the
supposed results.

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Replication means repeating the research, which may take days, weeks, months|
|or more, depending on the project. Reading and research are very different   |
|things, hence so are review and replication.."                               |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Review does not mean reading. Research does entail reading.

On July 18th, 2014, C. Gloster sent:
|-----------------------------------|
|"Lack of replication harms science.|
|                                   |
|Regards,                           |
|C. Gloster"                        |
|-----------------------------------|

On July 18th, 2014, David Wojick sent:
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"As for your second claim, failure to replicate does not show that the       |
|original research is unsound. This is another common confusion. There may be |
|a lot of procedural subtlety in the original research, which is not conveyed |
|in the journal article, which is very brief. As a result the replication     |
|attempt may fail simply because something was done differently. This has been|
|discussed at length at The Scholarly Kitchen. My wife recently pointed out an|
|amusing example from baking, which is applied chemistry. Forty people each   |
|made an angel food cake from the same recipe and all the resulting cakes had |
|in common was that each had a hole in the middle. Journal articles seldom    |
|provide even a recipe, so failure to replicate is not telling.               |
|                                                                             |
|David Wojick"                                                                |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

The article was vague.

To inflate my publication history, may I have your permission to
suggest you as a referee? I could claim that I found a mistake in the
initial cold-fusion claims and that now I really can produce cold
fusion. As you would be a referee, it clearly would not be necessary
to substantiate my boasts with reality nor even plausible evidence.