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‘If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market,’ says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical Association and intellectual father of the international congresses of peer review that have been held every four years since 1989. Peer review would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefi ts but a lot of evidence of its flaws.
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The Cochrane Collaboration, the organization that through its systematic reviews produces the most reliable evidence in medicine and health care, has reviewed the evidence on peer review of manuscripts and of grant proposals. This is its conclusion on peer review of manuscripts: ‘At present, little empirical evidence is available to support the use of editorial peer review as a mechanism to ensure quality of biomedical research’ [2]. And here is its conclusion on peer review of grant proposals: ‘There is little empirical evidence on the effects of grant giving peer review. No studies assessing the impact of peer review on the quality of funded research are presently available’ [3].
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Thirdly, peer review is largely a lottery. Multiple studies have shown how if several authors are asked to review a paper, their agreement on whether it should be published is little higher than would be expected by chance [11].

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As usual, you have no idea what you're talking about.

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....to hide your near-infinite ignorance.....

I know the peer-review process inside and out, and do not need to look at your so-called evidence to know that the process works far more often than it fails.  

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Public opinion is one thing; actual participation in terrorism is another. There is striking anecdotal evidence from Nasra Hassan, a United Nations relief worker in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who described interviews with 250 militants and their associates who were involved in the Palestinian cause in the late 1990s. Hassan concluded that “none of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires.”

   In the 1930s, Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He found an inverse relationship: when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower. Raper's work was influential, but it turned out to be flawed.

Claude Berrebi, now of the RAND Corporation’s Institute for Civil Justice, wrote his dissertation at Princeton on the characteristics of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were involved in terrorist activities. For example, he compared suicide bombers to the whole male pop­ulation aged 16 to 50 and found that the suicide bombers were less than half as likely to come from families that were below the poverty line. In addi­tion, almost 60 percent of the suicide bombers had more than a high school education, compared with less than 15 percent of the general population.

Jitka Malecková and I performed a similar study of militant members of Hezbollah, a multifaceted organization in Lebanon that has been labeled a ter­rorist organization by the U.S. State Department. We were able to obtain information on the biogra­phies of 129 deceased shahids (martyrs) who had been honored in the group’s newsletter, “Al-Ahd.” We turned translations by Eli Hurvitz at Tel Aviv University into a data­set and then combined it with information on the Lebanese popu­lation from the 1996 Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs Housing Survey of 120,000 peo­ple aged 15 to 38.

These deceased mem­bers of Hezbollah had a lower poverty rate than the Lebanese population: 28 percent versus 33 percent. And Hezbollah members were better educated: 47 percent had a secondary or higher education ver­sus 38 percent of adult Lebanese.

This is also the case, apparently, with al-Qaeda. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer, has written a book titled Understanding Terror Networks. He found that a high proportion of mem­bers of al-Qaeda were college educated (close to 35 percent) and drawn from skilled professions (almost 45 percent). Research on members of the Israeli extremist group, Gush Emunim, that Malecková and I conducted, also pointed in the same direc­tion. Perhaps most definitively, the Library of Congress produced a summary report for an advi­sory group to the CIA titled, “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” which also reached this conclusion—two years before 9/11.

Why are better educated, more advan­taged individuals more likely than others to join terrorist groups? I think of terrorism as a market, with a supply side and a demand side. Individuals, either in small groups or on their own, supply their services to terrorist organizations.

On the supply side, the economics of crime suggests that people with low opportunity costs will become involved in terrorism. Their costs of involvement are lower—that is, they sacrifice less because their prospects of living a rich life are less. In other domains of life, it is those with few oppor­tunities who are more likely to commit property crime and resort to suicide.

   Among Palestinians, almost 60 percent of the suicide bombers had more than a high school education, compared with less than 15 percent of the general population.

However, in the case of the supply of terrorists, while consideration of opportunity cost is not irrel­evant, it is outweighed by other factors, such as a commitment to the goals of the terrorist organi­zation and a desire to make a statement. Political involvement requires some understanding of the issues, and learning about those issues is a less costly endeavor for those who are better educated. I argue that better analogies than crime are vot­ing and political protest. Indeed, better educated, employed people are more likely to vote.

On the demand side, terrorist organizations want to succeed. The costs of failure are high. So the organizations select more able participants—which again points to those who are better educated and better off economically.

One of the conclusions from the work of Laurence Iannaccone—whose paper, “The Market for Martyrs,” is supported by my own research—is that it is very difficult to effect change on the supply side. People who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause have diverse motivations. Some are motivated by nationalism, some by religious fanati­cism, some by historical grievances, and so on. If we address one motivation and thus reduce one source on the supply side, there remain other motivations that will incite other people to terror.

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The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To under­stand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extrem­ist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

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‘If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market,’ says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical

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Hm... so the gist of that last Corribus post is that Elodin is doing exactly to peer review what Elodin posts Athiests do with anti-Christian sites?

Shoe? Other foot?

Am I right?

Edit: What's more, much like the common accusation (sometimes this does actually happen too) of athiests hijacking non-religious threads to post things from anti-religious sites, this seems to be happening now with things from anti-science sites? Again, form of a question, just wondering.

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Now, if you want to further discuss the issue of peer review start another topic

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In fact **I** am the one who referenced studies about peer review.

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Breast Cancer Research publishes selected research, proceedings and collections of thematic reviews as supplements. All articles published in supplements are subject to peer review and are free to access online. The journal also publishes supplements containing meeting abstracts.

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"Classical peer review: an empty gun"[1] by Richard Smith is a study which is focused on medical review but which applies to all scientific disciplines.
 

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Pre-publication peer review is overrated. Scientists have as many preconceptions as anyone else and are just as likely to be pushing an agenda or suppressing ideas of others. It is pretty much a coin toss as far as ensuring quality. Stroke the right egos and play to preconceptions and you can get crap published. Have a great paper that goes against what the "establishment" has faith in and you are likely to be declined.

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“Today, nothing is more important to the  future and credibility of science than liberation from the gravity-driven universe of prior theory. A mistaken supposition has not only prevented intelligent and sincere investigators from seeing what would otherwise be obvious, it has bred indifference to possibilities that could have inspired the sciences for decades.”
---David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill, Thunderbolts of the Gods

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Indeed, the attitude that whoever has the better credentials is correct is one of the reasons the studies show that peer review often fails

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