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 ====== Peer review ======
+Peer review is often presented as the [[gold standard]] of scientific quality control, the supposed [[firewall]] that keeps [[pseudoscience]], sloppiness, and bias at bay. In reality, it is a deeply flawed, opaque, and inconsistent process—more a ritual of academic legitimacy than a guarantee of methodological rigor or truth.
+==== 📉 Structural and Epistemic Failures ====
+  * **Subjectivity masquerading as rigor**: The criteria for “acceptance” vary wildly between reviewers, journals, and disciplines. Reviewers interpret originality, relevance, and validity through personal bias, disciplinary dogma, and institutional inertia. The result? An arbitrary gatekeeping system cloaked in pseudoscientific objectivity.
+  * **Anonymity and lack of accountability**: Double-blind (or worse, single-blind) peer review gives reviewers carte blanche to obstruct, delay, or sabotage work, often out of rivalry or misunderstanding, with no consequences. It creates an ideal environment for petty turf wars and intellectual stagnation.
+  * **Publication bias and confirmation culture**: Peer review overwhelmingly favors positive results, novelty, and alignment with prevailing theories. Replication studies, negative findings, and theoretical dissent are filtered out, leading to an academic echo chamber that rewards popularity over accuracy.
+  * **Incompetence and superficiality**: Reviewers are rarely trained in methodology or statistics. Many reviews consist of vague impressions or nitpicking over style and references, ignoring deeper methodological issues. The lack of standardization ensures that rigorous analysis is the exception, not the rule.
+==== 🔄 Review of the Reviewers ====
+  * **Voluntary labor, random expertise**: Peer reviewers are unpaid, overworked, and often selected more for availability than for relevant expertise. Review quality is wildly inconsistent; an excellent paper can be rejected by lazy or hostile reviewers, while flawed studies can sail through via mutual back-scratching.
+  * **Delays and obstructionism**: The peer review process often takes months or years, during which ideas grow stale or get scooped. In fast-moving fields like virology or machine learning, peer review is more of a bottleneck than a safeguard. In some areas, preprints and public critique are more timely and informative.
+==== 🧪 Empirical Irony ====
+  * **Lack of evidence for efficacy**: Despite its central role in academic publishing, peer review itself has almost no robust evidence backing its effectiveness. Meta-research consistently shows that peer-reviewed articles are not more reproducible, less biased, or even more accurate than non-reviewed counterparts.
+  * **Fraud still thrives**: Peer review fails spectacularly at detecting fraud, plagiarism, and fabricated data. High-profile scandals (e.g., Stapel, Wakefield) passed peer review. Journals routinely retract dozens of papers after publication—not due to post-publication review, but because the original reviewers missed the obvious.
+==== 💸 Perverse Incentives ====
+  * **Reviewer coercion and citation cartels**: Reviewers often demand citation of their own work to boost metrics. Journals and editorial boards quietly encourage citation rings. Far from neutral assessment, peer review becomes a vehicle for self-promotion and network reinforcement.
+  * **Publish-or-perish pressures**: Peer review is embedded in a larger academic economy that values quantity over quality. This fuels salami-slicing of research, hype over substance, and the publication of papers designed to get past reviewers—not to actually advance knowledge.
+==== 🛠 Alternatives Worth Considering ====
+  * **Open peer review** with signed comments and public discussion
+  * **Post-publication review** with transparent metrics and real-time correction
+  * **Methodological triage** by specialized review boards for stats and design
+  * **Preprint culture** fostering early critique and democratized access
+==== ✅ Bottom Line ====
+Peer review is a shaky, outdated mechanism pretending to be a fortress of quality. In practice, it is a ritual of academic performance: inconsistent, unaccountable, and easily gamed. What science needs is not blind deference to peer review, but a radical rethinking of how knowledge is vetted, shared, and improved.
 see [[Peer-reviewed journal]]