Telos said:
Non-profit organizations are subjected to the same kind of analysis from economists as for-profit organizations. Basically, the principle is "choice due to scarcity." For example, physicists have scarce (read "finite") resources and cannot engage in every theory or proposal that exists in the marketplace of ideas. No matter the motive, ideas will always cost time and money (read "resources"). So decisions must be made on which ideas will be examined.
This is more a factor when it comes to obtaining funding for research, not an issue when it comes time for publication. Some high impact journals (Science, for example) will be selective about what manuscripts get sent out for full review, but most journals send every manuscript out to reviewers. The reviewers do not need to decide anything about whether the journal has room for all the articles, what other articles will be published in the same issue, or anything else that may be economically driven. They simply evaluate the merit of the work in terms of the quality of science and appropriateness of methods, novelty (a really novel idea that is addressed well actually has a
better chance of getting published in a high impact journal than something that just puts a new twist on an old idea, or that only adds a small amount of information), and how thoroughly existing literature has been accounted for in the discussion.
There most certainly cannot be impartiality because we must be partial to handful of ideas - because we cannot explore them all at once. Resources are scarce. We cannot have everything all at once. We have to make a decision.
The decision stage is in whether to do the research or not. If the research is done and the paper is written, and if it is written well (see my above comments), there will be a journal somewhere for it. You'd be amazed at the variety of journals available for publication. There are journals that are very specialized and only accept papers that fit within a very small niche area of research, and others that are very general, some that a huge volume of submissions and become very selective that only the most novel, highest impact work gets accepted, while others will take almost anything as long as it doesn't have any methodological flaws.
I didn't mean to ask about "economic pressure," (and to be fair I didn't actually say that!) but to ask how close does "peer review" come to "peer pressure?"
This is the reason peer review is done anonymously. The authors are never informed who their reviewers are. This gives the reviewer the leeway to be completely candid in their review without fear of repercussions from the author. Manuscripts are also not reviewed by just a single person, but by two or three reviewers. Editors also can request more reviewers at their discretion if there is a large discrepancy among the opinions of the initial reviewers.
I did not mean to denigrate peer review or the fine people that engage in it. But can we dismiss theories simply because they do not find themselves in peer review journals? Or, in other words, can we dismiss theories simply because other people have dismissed them?
Yes and no. One can even dismiss a theory that
has been peer reviewed. Afterall, you publish taking into account all of the information that is available to you at the time you write and submit your publication and provide your best interpretation at that time. It is possible that
after publication, new information becomes available that disproves your theory, rendering even a peer-reviewed publication wrong. If something does not get accepted for publication in any peer-reviewed journal, it typically means there is a major flaw that the reviewers have identified. Even in the true sense of theory development (not the PF definition), a theory that is unpublished is still a work in progress. It may still be untrue, and it would still lack sufficient evidence to be publishable. Once sufficient evidence is obtained to support it, it can be published. No person in their right mind would discuss such a theory on an open forum such as this lest someone in a bigger and better funded lab scoop the project and beat you to the publication. Scientists do share these ideas with each other at this early stage, but it is done in scientific meetings accompanied by published abstracts that offer
some protection that the original idea is yours.
What does that say about our approach to theory development and acceptance? Why do we appear to have a tendency to accept theories of big and small that directly oppose one another?
I don't understand what you're asking here. Do you really mean acceptance or proposal of theories? When there are gaps in our knowledge of something, until those gaps are filled, sometimes seemingly opposing theories can both explain the data currently available. It doesn't mean either theory is accepted, but that controversy is present about which theory is correct. Scientists love controversy, it spices up life and gives us something to argue about, and arguing is what we do best.
The challenge then becomes testing both theories and pitting them against one another to find out which one is correct and which gets tossed out, or perhaps both get tossed out. Acknowledging the limitations of a theory is quite different from hatching up an entirely unfounded theory because it sounds good to the untrained.
Now, if you come up with a new theory that really challenges a currently accepted theory, you may need to jump through a number of extra hoops to gain acceptance, but if it is sound and holds up to critique, eventually it will get published and gain acceptance. The type of posts we have in theory development on PF are not those types of theories. They have glaring omissions, are unsubstantiated by experimental evidence, and often use little more than textbook physics or math as background (you're not going to develop the TOE based on nothing more than introductory textbook physics; a single 1000 page text is not a substitute for a library full of published works).
