Like many others, I too had not heard of “The Sokol Affair” until this weeks’ blog. I also did not have an understanding of what the term “peer-review” really meant until a few weeks ago in my Intro to Reference class when we discussed the two different methods (single blinded and double blinded). Throughout my undergrad, it was drilled into my head to always select peer-reviewed articles. Any article that was not peer-reviewed was marked negatively upon my final grade. Now that I understand what the words “peer-reviewed” means, everything makes so much more sense. In my opinion, I feel the process is a good idea but there seems to be so many flaws and room for error. If the process basically consists of a team of other researchers reading through a paper and giving their input, it all could depend on the team of people who are reading it. Like Prof. Galey mentioned in class, when submitting a journal you are likely to get at least two people to review it, and those revisions could be the exact opposite of one another. Who is to say which one is right, or if any are right? Looking at the “Sokol Affair”, a horrible paper was marked as high quality. Who is to say this team of researchers on the peer-review board making all of these revisions are correct in their process? Although the idea is great to have volunteer researchers revising other researchers work, there is so much room for error in letting poor journal articles be passed through as revised, while others that were of higher quality marked as not peer reviewed. Mind you, I guess that is basically what the name “peer-review” means: having the paper reviewed by peers (and who better than a team of other fellow research experts who also submit journals to be peer-reviewed).
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