| | | That's a good article, which I had read before. But to me, one of the most critical points in it should be raised each time you see the words "peer review:"
"It is unheard of for a peer reviewer to actually check the data and calculations. In 2004, I was asked by a journal (Climatic Change) to peer review an article. I asked to see the source code and supporting calculations. The editor said that no one had ever asked for such things in 28 years of his editing the journal. He refused to ask for source code; the author refused to provide supporting calculations. Out of my involvement, the journal ended up with a new data policy, which was all to the good. But there is nothing at the journal peer review stage in climate publications which is remotely like an audit."
Now, no one ever said it was an "audit," and in fact that is a different thing, which I would argue is a less stringent standard, but that's just me.
The important point is that in the editor's 28 years of editing, nothing he ever edited can be presumed to have had a peer review. That is, no one ever reviewed this work.
In fact, Montford recounted this story in more detail in "Hockey Stick Illusion," and it is was commonplace, and still presumably is, for major peer reviewers to simply perform a cursory reading of the paper, maybe make one or two minor comments, and move on.
There were a couple of incidents, and I can't remember the papers, where McIntyre found the reviewer had commented on relatively unimportant items leaving the glaring errors as unremarkable. This practice reminds me of a blatantly unethical "trick" accountants used to use in financial projections and tax returns to avoiding rounded numbers to give it appearance of greater precision when in fact it is a guess. You don't just comment on unimportant crap while looking away from the big stuff, yet that is precisely what they've done.
Peer review is dead to me. |
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