Peer review

Here's a paper I intended to look up as soon as it was out of embargo. Well, the embargo ended months ago. Better late than never, I suppose.

Peer review is one of those things the writers of journal articles go through. In a way, it's a quality control program for science. It may not sound very exciting, but it's one of those things we might want to know more about. And it may turn out to be useful in areas other than the science journals.

In science, peer review could be very useful in sorting through the claims we read in the papers or hear on broadcast media. Peer review turns out to be useful in other areas, as well.

The whole business with the CBS memos was an example of peer review, or really, distributed review. The documents were poseted on the web, and people who had some degree of expertise could look at them. Within hours, a consensus had emerged, despite the fact that a few maverick news outlets dissented. Not everyone who the documents over was an expert in any facet of document analysis, but enough were expert in at least one that the documents had a very thorough review in a very short time.

In a way, the entire blogosphere is a distributed review system. Someone who has knowledge about some aspect of life will follow particular stories. He'll post links, or at least cut and paste, and often comment on the stories. Other people are free to chime in with their observations, and if someone is all wet, we're sure to hear about it in very short order.

Anyone know what the "shopper effect" is? It's a peer review system. If a new product is good, people will hear about it, and usually from their friends. If a new product stinks, they'll really hear about it. (I have a couple of good recipes for tilapia, and I've been telling my friends about what a good fish that is.) This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's the reason why you don't have to spend hours on the web researching every item on your grocery list.

Anyway, this looks like a neat article. Peer review. It's not just for science anymore.