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Peer Review Definition

Peer reviewis the evaluation of creative work or performance by other

people in the same field in order to maintain or enhance the quality of the

work or performance in that field1.

It is based on the concept that a larger and more diverse group of people will

usually find more weaknesses and errors in a work or performance and will

be able to make a more impartial evaluation of it than will just the person or

group responsible for creating the work or performance.

Peer review utilizes the independence, and in some cases the anonymity, of

the reviewers in order to discourage cronyism(i.e., favoritism shown to

relatives and friends) and obtain an unbiased evaluation. Typically, the

reviewers are not selected from among the close colleagues, relatives or

friends of the creator or performer of the work, and potential reviewers are

required to disclose of any conflicts of interest.

Peer review helps maintain and enhance quality both directly by detecting

weaknesses and errors in specific works and performance and indirectly by

providing a basis for making decisions about rewards and punishment thatcan provide a powerful incentive to achieve excellence. These rewards and

punishments are related to prestige, publication, research grants,

employment, compensation, promotion, tenure and disciplinary action.

Peer review is used extensively in a variety of professional fields, including

academic and scientific research, medicine, law, accounting and

computersoftwaredevelopment. Even trial by jury is a form of peer review.

Peer review is legislatively mandated in some situations, particularly in law

and medicine. In others it is required by tradition and/or by administrative

rules, such as in academia. In some fields, such as software development, itoccurs naturally without any formal structure or requirements.

In the case ofpeer reviewed journals, which are usually academic and

scientific periodicals, peer review generally refers to the evaluation of

articles prior to publication. But in a broader sense, it could also refer to

articles following publication, as such articles often continue to be studied

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and debated for a longer period and by a much wider audience.

Despite its advantages, there have also been some criticisms of peer review.

One is that it can be slow, particularly in the case of academic journals, for

which many months or even a year or longer are sometimes required for

submitted articles to be reviewed and published.

Some critics believe that peer review has a built-in bias against highly

original works and results because reviewers (as do people in general) tend

to be more tolerant of works and results that are consistent with their own

views and more critical of those that contradict them. It should be kept in

mind that history is replete with examples of innovations that were

originally ridiculed by their peers because they contradicted the common

wisdom of the day2. The bias by academics against highly innovative work

may be in part a result of the fact that they have vested interests in

maintaining the status quo after having spent many years or decades

supporting it.

Moreover, it has been suggested that peer review is not always good at

detecting fraud, particularly in the case of articles submitted to scientific

journals. One reason for this is that the reviewers often do not have

immediate or full access to the data on which the articles are based (except

perhaps in fields such as mathematics where it is easy to provide the data

and attempt to replicate the results). However, longer term peer review (i.e.,

after the articles have been published) has proven to be much better at

detecting fraud.

The Internet is beginning to have a major effect on peer review. One way

has been to increase the speed and lower the cost of the communications

involved in reviewing works, such as articles prior to publication. In

addition, the movement of publications from hard copy format to online

format, which is still in its early stages, will further increase the speed of

publishing, reduce the cost of publishing, and make the publications much

more widely available, thereby facilitating the post-publication review of

articles by a larger number and greater variety of people.

In addition, because it allows anyone to publish and to do so at virtually no

cost, the Internet makes it much easier to give swift and widespread

exposure to highly innovative and controversial works that might have a

difficult time being getting into mainstream, peer reviewed hard copy

publications. However, there are so many articles and other items of

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obviously dubious quality on the Internet that it can be difficult to find those

that are truly promising.

The Internet has been having particularly profound effects on peer review

with regard to computer software. Most significantly, it has made possible

the development offree software(also known as open sourcesoftware) as a

viable alternative toproprietary software(i.e., commercial software).

Proprietary software is usually given relatively little independent peer

review because itssource codeis a tightly guarded secret and is generally

reviewed only by programmers, or a subset thereof, within the company

developing it. Without source code, which is the form that software is

originally written in by humans using a programming language, it is much

more difficult for programmers to detect errors, security vulnerabilities and

other weaknesses in software.

Free software, in contrast, tends to be subject to review by a much larger

and more diverse group of programmers both because its source code is

freely available on the Internet and because of the substantial number of

people who are passionate about studying and improving it3.

________1The wordpeeris often defined as a person of equal standing. However, in

the context of peer review it is generally used in a broader sense to refer topeople in the same profession who are of the same or higher ranking.

2Many of the individuals responsible for the world's greatest discoveries and

inventions were originally mocked and ridiculed by their peers. Among the

more famous examples are Darwin's discovery of evolution in the

nineteenth century, the discovery of continental drift (also referred to

asplate tectonics) by Alfred Wegener and others in the early 20th century,

and the Wright brothers' first heavier-than-air flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903.

3These motivations have been the subject of a great deal of study. For a briefsummary, seeIncentives to Develop Free Software,The Linux Information

Project, July 2005.

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