Peer review

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Concept.png Peer review 
(medical concept,  rigged science)Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
According to the official narrative, it is used to maintain quality standards.

Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work.[1] According to the official narrative, it functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Professional peer review is common in the field of health care, where it is usually called clinical peer review.

Official narrative

Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether a manuscript should be published in their journal.[2]

It attempts to encourage authors to meet the accepted high standards of their discipline and to control the dissemination of research data to ensure that unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations or personal views are not published without prior expert review.[3]

Rigged science

The Problem With Peer Review - Eric Weinstein

Richard Horton, former Editor of the medical journal the Lancet wrote:

“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”
Richard Horton [4]

Hidden conflicts of interest

For the pandemic years 2020 to 2022, Big Pharma transferred a total of about 545,000 US dollars per reviewer on average over the three years. The total amount amounted to about 1068 million dollars. The beneficiaries served as "peer reviewers" for the British Medical Journal, the US medical newspaper Jama, The Lancet or for the New England Journal of Medicine.[5][6]

About one billion of the total amount was received by the institutions at which the reviewers conducted their own research. About 64 million US dollars went to the 1155 reviewers themselves - for consulting, lectures, direct research sponsorship, royalties, travel expenses and much more.[6] While conflicts of interest of journal editors and authors have been somewhat investigated, the opaque nature of peer review has hindered the evaluation of peer reviewers, despite their crucial role in academic publishing.[5]



 

Related Quotation

PageQuoteAuthorDate
Malcolm Kendrick“One of the best games played to ensure that the status quo is disturbed as little as possible, is the use of peer review. In this system you ask acknowledged 'experts' in areas of medicine to review papers that are sent to you journals. Their job is then to decide if said papers are fit to publish. Of course, by definition, anyone who is an 'expert' in an are of medicine will be a supported of whatever dogma holds sway. Most likely, their entire career was built on developing and supporting it.”Malcolm Kendrick2015
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References