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Advantages and disadvantages of peer review

 

Advantages include:

  • Establishes the validity of research based upon the expert knowledge of other researchers in the discipline, therefore preventing falsified work from being accepted within an area of study.
  • Provides valuable feedback so that researchers can revise and improve their papers before publication.
  • Enables journal editors to select the most important research findings for publication in their journals, based upon the objective, independent reviews of an expert group.
  • The process of peer review is understood and accepted by the majority of researchers.

Disadvantages include:

  • It can cause lengthy delays in the dissemination of research findings.
  • It is a time consuming process which places considerable demands on the academic community. There has been extensive debate as to how effective the peer review process really is in detecting errors in academic papers.
  • It may be difficult to protect the anonymity of referees in very specialised research fields where there may be only a small number of experts.
  • It is sometimes accused of protecting established opinions and not being open to genuinely new ideas.
  • Ultimately it may not prevent the publication of poor research as review standards may be lower in less prestigious journals.
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Creative Commons License
PILOT - the Publication Process by Marion Kelt, GCU, Imperial College, London and East Midlands Research Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/emrsg/units/dissemination/