Bigfoot Investments wrote:
agip wrote:I don't doubt the value of peer review, but let's not kid ourselves - a peer reviewed piece may or may not be accurate. There have been a few hoaxes that show just because something is peer reviewed doesn't mean it is accurate.
These and other problems are
Fully agreed that peer review does not guarantee perfection of the final product. Nothing does.
It is, however, one of the best tools that humanity has going for validating pretty much any result in pretty much any field.
yeah - I'm sure we're not disagreeing. Much of my post got cut off for some reason. I referred to a couple of fraud cases that are amusing but of course severely atypical.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/jun/18/science-editor-resigns-hoax-articleand the classic (although not peer reviewed so not fair):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair