Contributed by: filbert Wednesday, January 21 2009 @ 11:33 PM CST
Peer review is simply a cursory check on the plausibility of a study. It is not a rigorous replication and it is certainly not a stamp of correctness of results. Many studies get far more rigorous peer review on blogs after publication than in journals. I use our ownblog for the purpose of getting good review before publication for some of my work now, because the review on blogs is often far better and more rigorous than from journals. This is not an indictment of peer review or journals, just an open-eyed recognition of the realities.
Emphasis mine. Remember this when somebody throws the buzz-word “peer-reviewed” in with the equally specious buzzword “consensus” when talking about questions of science.