Peer review To understand the peer review process

Peer review To understand the peer review process

• Publication is the goal of any research. Unless other people know of the research it is not useful. Typically research is first published in journals, these are stored in yearly volumes and they form a permanent scientific record. • When we read the research that has been published in journals we need to know that it is of good quality and hasn’t simply been made up. In order to achieve this, research goes through a system of peer review.

To ensure high standards are maintained, the editor will either accept the research for publication, or suggest revisions should be made before resubmitting it or they may decide to reject the research altogether. Peer review acts as a control mechanism only allowing only high quality research to appear in the public domain.

The UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (2002) have identified a number of different types of fraudulent research

The “Burt” affair • It is his research in behaviour genetics, most notably in studying the heritability of intelligence (as measured in IQ tests) using twin studies that have created the most controversy, frequently referred to as "the Burt Affair. "[20][21][22][23] • Shortly after Burt died it became known that all of his notes and records had been burnt, and he was accused of falsifying research data. From the late 1970 s, it was generally accepted that "he had fabricated some of the data, • The possibility of fabrication was first brought to the attention of the scientific community when Kamin noticed that Burt's correlation coefficients of monozygotic and dizygotic twins' IQ scores were the same to three decimal places, across articles – even when new data were twice added to the sample of twins. Leslie Hearnshaw, a close friend of Burt and his official biographer, concluded after examining the criticisms that most of Burt's data from after World War II were unreliable or fraudulent. [28] William H. Tucker argued in a 1997 article that: "A comparison of his twin sample with that from other well documented studies, however, leaves little doubt that he committed fraud. " [29] • • Psychologists Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton have pointed out that the controversial correlations reported by Burt are in line with the correlations found in other twin studies. [18][30] Rushton (1997) wrote that five different studies on twins reared apart by independent researchers corroborated Cyril Burt's findings and had given almost the same heritability estimate (average estimate 0. 75 vs. 0. 77 by Burt). [31] Jensen has also argued that "[n]o one with any statistical sophistication, and Burt had plenty, would report exactly the same correlation, 0. 77, three times in succession if he were trying to fake the data. " [30] • According to Earl B. Hunt, it may never be found out whether Burt was intentionally fraudulent or merely careless. Noting that other studies on the heritability of IQ have produced results very similar to those of Burt's, Hunt argues that Burt did not harm science in the narrow sense of misleading scientists with false results, but that in the broader sense science in general and behaviour genetics in particular were profoundly harmed by the Burt Affair, leading to an unjustified general rejection of genetic studies of intelligence and a drying up of funding for such studies. [32]

Causes for concern • The file drawer problem" refers to the bias introduced into the scientific literature by selective publication--chiefly by a tendency to publish positive results but not to publish negative or nonconfirmatory results. This leads to • Publication bias is a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it. Publication bias matters because literature reviews regarding support for a hypothesis can be biased if the original literature is contaminated by publication bias. [1] Publishing only results that show a significant finding disturbs the balance of findings. [2] Studies with significant results can be of the same standard as studies with a null result with respect to quality of execution and design. [3] However, statistically significant results are three times more likely to be published than papers with null results. [4] • • Lack of objectivity – when a person is influenced by personal feelings or opinions