Peer reviewed articles

[DRBUZZ0]

As a student doing research for homework, how would I know which to trust?

What you want is a research journal, such as the Journal Of the American Medical Association, the Journal Nature or some other academic or research journal. These are sepperate from other publications and if you go to a university or even a high school, you can ask the librarian if your school subscribes to any or has a database of them which can be accessed.

Some journals may carry a couple of editorials or general news items in the front, but generally peer-reviewed studies and reports are easy to find.

The peer review process is less than perfect, but it's pretty good. Obviously it is impossible to validate all studies, without completely auditing them and even redoing the studies to make sure they are correct, but the peer review process is about the best you could reasonably expect and usually works very well.

 

[Fredrik]

The problem with "peer review" is that any group of idiots can decide to review each other. For example, this guy published some of his nonsense in something called "The Noetic Journal" which claims to be "an inter-disciplinary peer-reviewed science journal".

He claims that he has proved, scientifically, that God exists. He says that God is the Einstein tensor of the four-dimensional space where each point represents extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism and intelligence. (Why didn't I think of that? )

 

[blutoski]

I have an idea how peer review works, but how do you know if a specific article has been peer-reviewed ?

Is there a note somewhere in the article or do you have to go by the review policy of the publication ?

Thanks

nimzo

Publications have peer-review processes or they don't. So, start with the publication.

Secondly, this is no guarantee that the article was peer-reviewed. Watch for that: some publications will peer-review their serious submissions, but will not peer-review special submissions or letters to the editor.

The reason I bring up this warning, is that many quacks pad their sales pitches with citations in respected publications. But their submissions were published without peer-review "in the interest of fairness," or merely as a letter to the editor. This doesn't stop them from misleading the consumer into believing the quack has mainstream currency.

 

[JJM]

{snip} Unfortunately, indexing in PubMed does not relate to the validity of "peer reviewed" journals. The NIH was/is under political pressure to be kind to quacks, so they include homeopathic and chiropratic "peer reviewed" magazines. {snip}

I just noticed the word "not" was missing- totally altering the meaning of the sentence in that post.

The NIH (National Institutes of Health) is becoming a disgrace; although, to be fair, they are under a lot of political pressure. They have a web site where you can get "reliable" health information. They will put you in touch with a homeopath or an acupuncturist. When the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) complained- NIH investigated and left the quack links; but they deleted the link to NACHF!?