peer review

• peer review


  the assessment of scientific work by experts in the same field to check for any problems and make sure it is of high quality
• the main purposes of peer review:

  • to know which research is worthwhile
  • to validate the relevance and quality of the research - this prevents fraudulent research being released
  • suggest possible improvements or amendments to the research study
• A limitation of peer review is that any research which opposes mainstream theories tends to be suppressed. This means established scientists' work is more likely to be published and new/ challenging ideas are usually rejected. This means the rate of change in scientific fields is slowed down.
• A limitation of peer review is that it can be difficult to find an expert. Smith (1999) argues because of this a lot of poor research is passed as the reviewer didn't really understand the work.
• A limitation of peer review is publication bias. Editors tend to prefer to publish headline grabbing findings and positive results. This means negative results are intentionally not published which causes there to be a misconception of the current state of psychology.