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arXiv Preprint The Shackles of Peer Review: Unveiling the Flaws in the Ivory Tower Ying Liu, Kaiqi Yang, Yue Liu, Michael G. B. Drew http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05966 同行评审伦理:象牙塔中的缺陷 刘颖,杨凯奇,刘跃,DREW Michael G. B https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.05966 抛弃“同行评议”,获得“专家共识” https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-279293-1377383.html [Ref. 1] “Can so many scientists have been wrong over the eighty years since 1925? Unhappily, yes. The mainstream in science, as any scientist will tell you, is often wrong. Otherwise, come to think of it, science would be complete. Few scientists would make that claim, or would want to. Statistical significance is surely not the only error in modern science, although it has been, as we will show, an exceptionally damaging one. Scientists are often tardy in fixing basic flaws in their sciences despite the presence of better alternatives. Think of the half century it took American geologists to recognize the truth of drifting continents, a theory proposed in 1915 by—of all eminently ignorable people—a German meteorologist. Scientists, after all, are human. What Nietzsche called the ‘twilight of the idols,’ the fear of losing a powerful symbol or god or technology, haunts us all” Ziliak, S. T. and McCloskey, D. N. (2008). The cult of statistical significance: how the standard error costs us jobs, justice, and lives. University of Michigan Press [Ref. 2] Nobel laureate Tasuku Honjo: “First-class work often overturns the established conclusion, so it is unpopular. The reviewers cannot fully understand your work and will give you many negative comments, …. Articles catering to the trend of the times are easy to be accepted, otherwise, it will take a long time to get recognized” (2000) and “If your research can’t overturn the established conclusion, science can’t progress. Of course, your research will be not recorded in history. The academic world is conservative. If you don’t write your paper according to the existing conclusion, it will be very difficult for your paper to be accepted, and you will suffer a lot, but the research that can survive in history is exactly this kind of research.“ (2013) https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BaFe12-iCeiO19-PPy https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/389134254 [Ref. 3] “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” M. Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Paper, William & Norgate, London, 1950, pp. 33 -34. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/407998797 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/363487648 [Ref. 4] “some scientists wondered how a questionable line of research persisted for so long … experts were just too timid to take a stand.” Harvard calls for retraction of dozens of studies by noted cardiologist, New York Times, http://www.staradvertiser.com/2018/10/16/news/harvard-calls-for-retraction-of-dozens-of-studies-by-noted-cardiologist/. 16 Oct 2018 [Ref. 5] S. Vazire, A toast to the error detectors, Nature 577(7788) (2020) 9. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03909-2 [Ref. 6] “Poster 1: Charles Townes and the Laser [After] we had been at it for two years, Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairman of the department — both of them Nobel laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot of weight behind their opinions — came into my office and sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source as did mine. ‘Look,’ they said, ‘you should stop the work you are doing. It isn‘t going to work. You know it‘s not going to work. We know it‘s not going to work. You‘re wasting money. Just stop!’ But Townes had come to Columbia on tenure, so he knew he couldn’t be fired for incompetence or ordered around. Nevertheless, the awesome weight of Rabi‘s reputation in particular — a one-time senior member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s legendary Radiation Laboratory set up by Vannevar Bush to develop wartime radar — must have been daunting. Such top brass cannot be defied lightly, and showing extraordinary courage, this junior faculty member stood his ground, and respectfully told his exalted colleagues that he would continue. Two months later (in April 1954), his experiment worked, and the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) was born. Three years after that Arthur Schawlow, Townes‘ postdoc at Columbia, had moved to the Bell Laboratories, and their collaboration led to the optical version of the maser — the laser. Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for these discoveries [shared with Aleksander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov (USSR), who developed the maser and laser independently]. Schawlow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1981 for his work on laser spectroscopy.” Donald W. Braben – Scientific Freedom – The Elixir of Civilization, Wiley Interscience (2008) [Ref. 7] “So we have little evidence on the effectiveness of peer review, but we have considerable evidence on its defects. In addition to being poor at detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798 Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals [Ref. 8] “Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don‘t please reviewers get rejected … Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat. Remember that it used to be obviously true that the Earth is the center of the universe, and if scientific journals had existed in Copernicus‘ time, geocentrist reviewers would have rejected his paper and patted themselves on the back for preventing the spread of misinformation. Eugenics used to be hot stuff in science—do you think a bunch of racists would give the green light to a paper showing that Black people are just as smart as white people? Or any paper at all by a Black author? (And if you think that‘s ancient history: this dynamic is still playing out today.) We still don‘t understand basic truths about the universe, and many ideas we believe today will one day be debunked. Peer review, like every form of censorship, merely slows down truth.” https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review The rise and fall of peer review [Ref. 9] “Professor Braben argues that the introduction in the 1970s of the (peer) review of research proposals has led to a dearth of big scientific discoveries. The most radical ideas, he says, are unlikely to get funded because it is difficult to impress peers before they have been proven. … It (peer review) works well enough in the mainstream but it is at the margins where major discoveries are made, where people don’t believe in the current wisdom and want to head off into dramatically different directions. To submit those ideas to peer review is disastrous” https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/kill-peer-review-save-civilisation/401457.article?storyCode=401457&site=cn Kill peer review, save civilization [Ref. 10] “On the off chance you do figure out a way to improve peer review without also making it worse, you can try convincing the nearly 30,000 scientific journals in existence to apply your magical method to the ~4.7 million articles they publish every year. Good luck!” https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review The rise and fall of peer review [Ref. 11] “We thus planned to make posting peer review documents the next stage in opening up our peer review process, … The final step was, in my mind, to open up the whole process and conduct it in real time on the web in front of the eyes of anybody interested. Peer review would then be transformed from a black box into an open scientific discourse. Often I found the discourse around a study was a lot more interesting than the study itself.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798 J R Soc Med. 2006 Apr; 99(4): 178–182. doi: 10.1258/jrsm.99.4.178 Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals [Ref. 12] “Beyond these considerations, the importance of many of the more recent developments cannot be evaluated objectively at this time. The history of mathematics teaches us that many subjects which aroused tremendous enthusiasm and engaged the attention of the best mathematicians ultimately faded into oblivion ... Indeed one of the interesting questions that the history answers is what survives in mathematics. History makes its own and sounder evaluations.” --Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Oxford University Press, 1972, ISBN 0-19-506136-5 引申:历史是最公正的。历史反复证明,那些在当世喧嚣尘上的东西往往是主流学者刻意炒作的糟粕,而那些被当世打压的经常是真金白银。 Expansion: History serves as the ultimate arbiter. It consistently reveals that what is often overemphasized by the prominent scholars of an era is often merely the intentional promotion of mediocrity, while that which is suppressed by the prevailing contemporary scholars often reveals itself to be authentic and of true value. 梳理这段历史,会发现这些重大原始创新在刚面世时都遭到了业界的质疑和抵制,差点夭折。 这不是个例,浮栅晶体管、异质结、绝缘栅双极型晶体管(IGBT)、微机电系统(MEMS)、浸没式光刻等重大发明都遭到过抵制。 为什么这些发明一开始都不受待见呢?芯片的发展离不开持续的创新和超越,然而创新越大,对传统的叛逆和颠覆也越大,因而遭到传统势力的抵制就越大。 中国科学报,2023-09-16 第3版 读书 When delving into this historical period, it becomes apparent that these groundbreaking original innovations faced skepticism and opposition within the industry upon their initial emergence, nearly teetering on the brink of extinction. This phenomenon is not an isolated occurrence; major breakthroughs like floating-gate transistors, heterojunctions, insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), immersion lithography, and others have also confronted resistance. What prompted this initial lack of acceptance for these inventions? The advancement of semiconductor technology hinges on ongoing innovation and breakthroughs. However, the greater the innovation, the more it challenges and disrupts established norms, resulting in heightened resistance from traditional forces. Published in China Science Daily, September 16, 2023, 3rd Edition, Book Review. https://news.sciencenet.cn/dz/dzzz_1.aspx?dzsbqkid=39253 https://news.sciencenet.cn/dz/upload/2023/9/20239156508226.pdf https://www.peeref.com/roulette-hubs/1044 https://www.peeref.com/roulette-hubs/1037 https://www.peeref.com/roulette-hubs/1040 https://www.peeref.com/roulette-hubs/1036 https://www.peeref.com/roulette-hubs/1026 https://www.peeref.com/roulette-hubs/1046

Perspectives

学术圈某种意义上像是个派系林立的“江湖”,学术权威如同“教主”一样,普通学者没有力量反抗其观点。 随着发表的错误论文越来越多,跟风研究的越来越多,大家都成了既得利益者,就默许了这些错误的观点继续流传下去。 ———— 科技日报,2018-10-18 第01版:今日要闻,骗了全世界十余年 干细胞“学术大牛”走下神坛 https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1614619477235832974&wfr=spider&for=pc https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1614619476870888302 https://www.rmzxb.com.cn/c/2018-10-18/2193148.shtml

Professor Ying Liu
Shenyang Normal University

In a certain sense, the academic community resembles a faction-ridden "martial arts world," where academic authorities wield power akin to "sect leaders," and ordinary scholars lack the strength to challenge their viewpoints. As the number of erroneous papers being published increases and more researchers follow the trend, everyone becomes a beneficiary, tacitly allowing these incorrect viewpoints to continue propagating. — Science and Technology Daily, 2018-10-18, Page 01: Today's Headlines, Deception Spanning Over a Decade: Academic "Masters" in the Field of Stem Cells Fall from Grace

Yue Liu
Shenyang Normal University

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This page is a summary of: Natural Mathematical Derivation of the Gibbs–Duhem Equation Related to ΔG and ∂G/∂ξ, International Journal of Thermophysics, March 2022, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10765-022-02998-y.
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