Peer review

:This article refers to the scholarly process of screening papers. For the Wikipedia process of improving articles, see .

Peer review and fraud

Peer review, in scientific journals, assumes that the article reviewed has been honestly written, and the process is not designed to detect fraud. The reviewers usually do not have full access to the data from which the paper has been written and some elements have to be taken on trust (except perhaps in subjects such as mathematics).

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The number and proportion of articles which are detected as fraudulent at review stage is unknown. Some instances of outright scientific fraud and scientific misconduct have got through review and were detected only after other groups tried and failed to replicate the published results.

Related Topics:
Scientific fraud - Scientific misconduct

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An example is the case of Jan Hendrik Schön, in which a total of fifteen papers were accepted for publication in the top ranked journals Nature and Science following the usual peer review process. All fifteen were found to be fraudulent and were subsequently withdrawn. The fraud was eventually detected, not by peer review, but after publication when other groups tried and failed to reproduce the results of the paper.

Related Topics:
Jan Hendrik Schön - Nature - Science

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An example of what can happen within academic publications without peer-review is that of NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal's publication of Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in the journal Social Text. The submission for publication by Sokal was a hoax that became known as the Sokal Affair.

Related Topics:
NYU - Alan Sokal - Hoax - Sokal Affair

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