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La rivista di filosofia e politica, diretta da Paolo Flores d'Arcais, al servizio delle grandi battaglie civili, della coscienza democratica e della riflessione sulla politica in Italia. Contro il pensiero unico dominante.
It is often said that peer review is one of the pillars of scientific research. It is also well known that peer review doesn't actually do its job very well, and, every few years, people like me start writing articles about alternatives to peer review. This isn't one of those rants. Instead, I'm going to focus on something that is probably less well known: peer review actually has two jobs. It's used to provide minimal scrutiny for new scientific results, and to act as a gatekeeper for funding agencies.
What I would like to do here is outline some of the differences between peer review in these two jobs and the strengths and weaknesses of peer review in each case. This is not a rant against peer review, nor should it be—I have been pretty successful in both publications and grant applications over the last couple of years. But I think it's worth exploring the idea that peer review functions much better in the case of deciding the value of scientific research than it does when acting as a gatekeeper for scientific funding.
Y. Yang, and X. Liu. SIGIR '99: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, page 42--49. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (1999)