Tag Archives: Harvard Kennedy School
A Rant on Peer Review
Think fish study’s when you read this. Professor George J. Borjas – I have a few pet peeves. One of them is how “peer review” is perceived by far too many people as the gold standard certification of scientific authority. Any academic who’s been through the peer review process many times (as I have) knows that the process is full of potholes and is sometimes subverted by unethical behavior on the part of editors and reviewers. The reason I bring this up is because of a brewing scandal in my own discipline, economics. There has been online discussion about this for over a month, but I’ve delayed this post both because I’ve been traveling too much and because I was hoping for a resolution before I wrote anything down. But as a junior economist recently told me: “The relative silence by senior economists regarding the editorial handling of this paper has been deafening.” So here it goes. Read the rest here 11:00
