Comments on: peer-review, what it is good for? (peer-reviewed Monday) http://info-fetishist.org/2009/03/18/peer-review-what-it-is-good-for-peer-reviewed-monday/ yeah, it's long -- I didn't have time to make it shorter Fri, 18 May 2012 17:15:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Sara J http://info-fetishist.org/2009/03/18/peer-review-what-it-is-good-for-peer-reviewed-monday/#comment-510 Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:10:39 +0000 http://info-fetishist.org/?p=439#comment-510 I’m wondering how to connect this notion of “peer review” to my spring term class in “Critical Reviewing” – books, films, food, art, etc. Of course the goals are somewhat different – with peer review being a preliminary to publication – a guide and judge both. For the critics and reviewers in my class, their work is post-publication (extending that word to mean the cooking of a meal, installation of an art exhibit, etc) but the same expectations of knowledge and generosity along with experienced criteria and service to readers (of the reviews) is involved, I think.

]]> By: Shaun Huston http://info-fetishist.org/2009/03/18/peer-review-what-it-is-good-for-peer-reviewed-monday/#comment-505 Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:18:55 +0000 http://info-fetishist.org/?p=439#comment-505 To build on the “alternative explanation”-type reasons for rejection, in my experiences with peer review, defining the relevant peers for a given article is one reason why arguably innovative scholarship gets rejected. An editor asks someone who works in the same general area as the paper, say the research is about some region of the world, but the author and the reviewer do so from radically different perspectives, say that the reviewer really is a “specialist” in the region, while the author’s interests are more topical, but the region in question is a useful case. The reviewer rejects or heavily criticizes the article for missing this or that piece of the literature on the region, even though said literature has no relevance to how the author of the paper is looking at that place. The problem here is that the paper is not being looked at on its own terms, but has become a pawn in a professional chess game over what it means to do research on a particular subject, with the reviewer, essentially, asserting their primacy over the definition of “their” field.

You’d like to think that editors would referee these kinds of situations, but, also in my experience, you can’t count on that. I don’t even know how many editors bother to read the papers themselves in many cases.

As to your concluding thoughts, I agree that peer-reviewed journals are not the only places where meaningful scholarly dialogue and inquiry happens. One of Doreen Massey’s most influential papers, republished, cited countless times, given its own chapter and section in textbooks, was originally published in a political magazine, not a scientific journal.

]]>