Are peer-reviews really a good way?

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the problematic peer-review process. It is intended to ensure a high scientific quality but often also causes the rejection of innovative work as reviewers are coming from a different field or simply do not take the time to really read a paper.

Currently, the common way of publishing scientific results is to write them up in a paper, submit it to a journal or conference, and let peer-reviewers decide whether the approach is correct or not. While this ensures a certain degree of scientific quality, it also creates some unneccessary obstacles.

Depending of the scope of the journal or the conference, authors might have to deal with reviewers coming from different scientific directions. As a result, there is a chance of being mainly reviewed by researchers who have no in-depth experience in the paper’s topic. This leads to the problem that these reviewers then potentially cannot correctly value the contributions of a paper as the presented approach might seem wrong to them. There is also the chance that they accept a paper that has no real novelty as they cannot discover wrong approaches.

Thus, it is possible that good and important research gets critized and rejected because it seems incorrect from a certain perspective. This especially is problematic when a new technology is being used that is not well discussed in literature due to its novelty. Then, scientists have a hard time finding a good theoretical basis that goes beyond the scientific curiosity.

Last year, I experienced such a rejection. The reviewers did not understand why I compared the effects of immersive virtual reality with the effects of desktop 3D in respect to the training outcome of a serious game. This week, I was asked a similar question during a conference. Interestingly, the question was not being asked because there was no understanding for my approach, but because the scientist was criticized for similar reasons. He just wanted to see if I was able to come up with a better explanation.

In the end, this question made me thinking again about the entire peer-review process. Is it really ensuring a good scientific quality when it results in the rejections of interesting projects due to a lack of previous work? How can this be a good approach when it effectively blocks innovation? I hope the scientific community will reconsider this approach one day and come up with a better solution to ensure a high quality without blocking innovative research.