Abstract
This candid perspective written by scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds is intended to advance conversations about the realities of peer review and its inherent limitations. Trust in a process or institution is built slowly and can be destroyed quickly. Trust in the peer review process for scholarly outputs (i.e., journal articles) is being eroded by high-profile scandals, exaggerated news stories, exposés, corrections, retractions, and anecdotes about poor practices. Diminished trust in the peer review process has real-world consequences and threatens the uptake of critical scientific advances. The literature on “crises of trust” tells us that rebuilding diminished trust takes time and requires frank admission and discussion of problems, creative thinking that addresses rather than dismisses criticisms, and planning and enacting short- and long-term reforms to address the root causes of problems. This article takes steps in this direction by presenting eight peer review reality checks and summarizing efforts to address their weaknesses using a harm reduction approach, though we recognize that reforms take time and some problems may never be fully rectified. While some forms of harm reduction will require structural and procedural changes, we emphasize the vital role that training editors, reviewers, and authors has in harm reduction. Additionally, consumers of science need training about how the peer review process works and how to critically evaluate research findings. No amount of self-policing, transparency, or reform to peer review will eliminate all bad actors, unscrupulous publishers, perverse incentives that reward cutting corners, intentional deception, or bias. However, the scientific community can act to minimize the harms from these activities, while simultaneously (re)building the peer review process. A peer review system is needed, even if it is imperfect.
Peer review and the trust crisis
Trust is a complex psychological and social process (Lewis and Weigert 1985; Evans and Krueger 2009). Though it is difficult to define (Rousseau et al. 1998), one of the more common dictionary definitions of trust is a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something (see McKnight and Chervany (2001) for a typology of definitions). Trust has tremendous social benefits. High-trust societies tend to be more tolerant, have higher levels of social cohesion, and have higher subjective levels of well-being (Welch et al. 2005; Hudson 2006). Trust in other people (interpersonal trust) and institutions (institutional trust—including trust in experts and authorities) are both important for public discourse and democracy (Warren 2018). However, trust is fragile and asymmetrical, as it is built slowly but lost quickly (Lewicki and Brinsfield 2017; Cvitanovic et al. 2021). Moreover, “trust crises” are rarely rebuilt by time alone (Millstone and Van Zwanenberg 2000). Rebuilding trust takes intentional and difficult work, usually involving listening to critics, admitting problems, and having a willingness to enact real changes to demonstrate that the problems have been reduced or eliminated (Alexandre et al. 2013; Lewicki and Brinsfield 2017; Altenmüller et al. 2021).
Over the last few decades, trust and mistrust in science has received much attention (Wilkie 1996; Hendriks et al. 2016; Funk et al. 2019). We use the word “science” in the broadest sense to capture scholarly activities across all domains and not just the natural, physical, health, or social sciences. For a wide range of issues such as climate change (Hamilton et al. 2015; Lacey et al. 2018), vaccines (Black and Rappuoli 2010; Hamilton et al. 2015), or public health measures during pandemics (Kreps and Kriner 2020; Rutjens et al. 2021), trust in science is necessary to persuade the public to support initiatives intended to benefit people and the planet. There is evidence that trust in science is waning, fueled by extreme anti-science views that are shared and amplified by some politicians and celebrities (Tollefson 2020), and exacerbated by social (Huber et al. 2019) and conventional (Ophir and Jamieson 2021) media. The effects of media misinformation are so widespread that new terms have been invented to describe it, such as alternative facts, truthiness, and post-truth (Sismondo 2017; Vernon 2017; Wight 2018).
