The HBS hosts dig into the crisis of academic peer review.

Peer review, touted as the gold standard for ensuring research quality, has come under increasing scrutiny. Decades of studies have revealed surprising inconsistencies: from papers initially hailed as groundbreaking being rejected upon resubmission, to the current “retraction crisis,” to concerns about bias and subjectivity among reviewers. Because peer review is not only central to the production of knowledge, but also the security and advancement of knowledge-prodcers’ careers, mounting concerns about this practice raise a lot of important questions.

In this episode, we discuss the following ideas/texts/thinkers/etc:

• The problem of retract and resubmit
• The “retraction crisis”
• Bias in peer reviews
• Neil Levy, Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review (Cambridge, 2023)
• The “reviewer #2” meme
• For-profit academic publishers
• Alternatives to traditional peer review
• The replication crisis
• The journal AI and Society