Friday, February 5, 2010

The Politicization of Peer Review

Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy has short post on the politicization of the peer review process:
Among other things, the release of e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has laid bare the efforts of a handful of climate scientists to manipulate how the peer review process handled research that could undermine claims of a climate science “consensus.” As climate scientists David Douglass and John Christy detail here, the CRU e-mails reveal a concerted effort to sandbag one of their publications, both in the peer-reviewed scientific literature as well as on the purportedly neutral climate science blog RealClimate. Patrick Michaels and Roger Pielke Jr. have more.

What these and other episodes reveal was that there was a concerted effort to stage-manage the appearance of an ironclad consensus at the expense of the scientific process.

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