---
title: "Scholarly peer review"
chunk: 11/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:44:38.682666+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Allegations of bias and suppression ===
The interposition of editors and reviewers between authors and readers may enable the intermediators to act as gatekeepers. Some sociologists of science argue that peer review makes the ability to publish susceptible to control by elites and to personal jealousy.
The peer review process may sometimes impede progress and may be biased against novelty. A linguistic analysis of review reports suggests that reviewers focus on rejecting the applications by searching for weak points, and not on finding the high-risk/high-gain groundbreaking ideas that may be in the proposal. Reviewers tend to be especially critical of conclusions that contradict their own views, and lenient towards those that match them. At the same time, established scientists are more likely than others to be sought out as referees, particularly by high-prestige journals/publishers. As a result, ideas that harmonize with the established experts' are more likely to see print and to appear in premier journals than are iconoclastic or revolutionary ones. This accords with Thomas Kuhn's well-known observations regarding scientific revolutions. A theoretical model has been established whose simulations imply that peer review and over-competitive research funding foster mainstream opinion to monopoly.
Criticisms of traditional anonymous peer review allege that it lacks accountability, can lead to abuse by reviewers, and may be biased and inconsistent.
There have also been suggestions of gender bias in peer review, with male authors being likely to receive more favorable treatment. A 2021 study found in some respects bias in favor of female authors and found no evidence for bias in favor of male authors.
Political bias can be found in reviewer evaluations.

=== Exploitation of free work ===
Most academic publishers do not financially compensate reviewers for their participation in the peer-review process, which has been criticized by the academic community. Whereas some publishers have contended that it is economically not feasible to pay reviewers, some journals have started to pay reviewers through platforms such as Research Square when they are unable to receive free reviews. Other publishers such as Advances.in have made paying reviewers an inherent part of their business model.

=== Open access journals and peer review ===
Some critics of open access (OA) journals have argued that, compared to traditional subscription journals, open access journals might utilize substandard or less formal peer review practices, and, as a consequence, the quality of scientific work in such journals will suffer. In a study published in 2012, this hypothesis was tested by evaluating the relative "impact" (using citation counts) of articles published in open access and subscription journals, on the grounds that members of the scientific community would presumably be less likely to cite substandard work, and that citation counts could therefore act as one indicator of whether or not the journal format indeed impacted peer review and the quality of published scholarship. This study ultimately concluded that "OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges," and the authors consequently argue that "there is no reason for authors not to choose to publish in OA journals just because of the 'OA' label.

=== Failures ===
Peer review fails when a peer-reviewed article contains fundamental errors that undermine at least one of its main conclusions and that could have been identified by more careful reviewers. Many journals have no procedure to deal with peer review failures beyond publishing letters to the editor. Peer review in scientific journals assumes that the article reviewed has been honestly prepared. The process occasionally detects fraud, but is not designed to do so. When peer review fails and a paper is published with fraudulent or otherwise irreproducible data, the paper may be retracted. A 1998 experiment on peer review with a fictitious manuscript found that peer reviewers failed to detect some manuscript errors and the majority of reviewers may not notice that the conclusions of the paper are unsupported by its results.

==== Fake peer review ====
There have been instances where peer review was claimed to be performed but in fact was not; this has been documented in some predatory open access journals (e.g., the "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" affair) or in the case of sponsored Elsevier journals.
In November 2014, an article in Nature exposed that some academics were submitting fake contact details for recommended reviewers to journals, so that if the publisher contacted the recommended reviewer, they were the original author reviewing their own work under a fake name. The Committee on Publication Ethics issued a statement warning of the fraudulent practice. In March 2015, BioMed Central retracted 43 articles and Springer retracted 64 papers in 10 journals in August 2015. Tumor Biology journal is another example of peer review fraud.
In 2020, the Journal of Nanoparticle Research fell victim to an "organized rogue editor network", who impersonated respected academics, got a themed issue created, and got 19 substandard articles published (out of 80 submitted). The journal was praised for dealing with the scam openly and transparently.
In 2023, the journal Airbursts and Cratering Impacts was founded by members of the Comet Research Group to publish "cutting-edge, impact-related investigations" that among other things, according to its web page, "have been rejected by other journals". It has been described as a "vanity journal", where authors "self-edit, self-review and republish versions of their own retracted papers and manuscripts that have repeatedly been rejected by legitimate journals".