Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlines between reason

and nonsense. I am your host, Massimo Piliucci. And with me as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, our topic today is the peer review process, the process by which papers get

approved for academic publication, it's pretty

much a black box to most people. So we're going to try to demystify it a bit and talk about some of the

potential problems with it and ways that that impacts the development of science. And also some of the

ways that the peer review process is changing or being undermined in the the new era of online science yeah so so should we start with the basic outline

of the way it usually works yeah why don't why don't you give that outline because I'm sure

you're more directly familiar with it than I am yeah I'd say a little too much familiar you know

as an author has a reviewer, and as an editor, actually.

So I've done all three the major roles. And the process is really pretty straightforward,

at least in the basic idea. So you are an author of a scholarly paper, and no matter what

the discipline is, be science, philosophy, you know, English literature,

whatever, you submit, you read up your paper, of course, in a certain style, which it's usually

pretty well established within a particular discipline. So in some, most science papers, for instance,

have a canonical structure. They start out with an introduction. They continue with the materials

and methods so that people know what you actually did in practice and how to replicate it if they want to.

There's a results section when you actually present the data and then finally a discussion

when you tell the people why this all thing is relevant and what it means.

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