This is an IHeart podcast.

Science is supposed to be our best way of revealing the truth about the universe.

But science is constantly being updated and corrected.

And sometimes we learn after the fact that a study was flawed or even was shoddy to begin with.

So how do scientists decide whether a new result is robust or not?

And how does the general public know when the science is settled or about to be upended?

No system is perfect, but it's important that the process is transparent.

So today we're going to shine a light on the inner workings of one of the crucial parts of the scientific process, peer review.

How does it work? Who are these peers? Can peer reviewed papers be wrong?

And does that mean that all of science is questionable?

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's peer-reviewed universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist, and I've published over a thousand papers, but haven't read most of them.

Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith, and I'm confused.

What does that mean, Daniel? How have you published over a thousand papers?

At the LHC, does everybody who is...-ding, ding, ding, that's it.

Oh, that's cheating, man. That's cheating. Well, the way the collaboration works is everybody who's

contributed to the project is an author. And when you're an author, you get included on every paper

that comes out during your authorship period. And Atlas is a huge collaboration of lots of

clever people. We put out about 100 papers a year. Every single one has my name on it. And I haven't

read most of them. I couldn't even explain the titles of some of them to you. So in my,

so fields have their own cultures. In my field, in my culture, that would ethically not be okay.

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