Peer Review
The peer review or refereeing is an evaluation used to evaluate written works carried out by one or more people with similar competences to the producers of the work (experts) but who they are not part of the editorial staff of the work to be evaluated, in order to ensure the quality, feasibility and scientific rigor of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation of qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to determine scientific and technical quality standards, provide credibility, and proofread original articles written by researchers.
In academia, historians of science often consider the "peer-review" as an important part of the progress that science has experienced since the 19th century. Many scientists, especially in the area of experimental sciences, consider it an essential component of scientific activity. In other words, without this system, many scientists consider that the advancement of science would be jeopardized because it would not be easy to discriminate quality articles from those that are mere repetitions of things already discovered, or even to differentiate between the best works and those that contained serious errors or bad practices. However, peer review is not without its flaws and problems. For example, sometimes editorial decisions to reject (or accept) are wrong. The evaluation process is not infallible either and almost every year a scandal arises in the form of already published articles that must be withdrawn because bad practices have been discovered a posteriori in it, from falsified data to plagiarism or conflicts of interest. The review by Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity is performed, for example, medical peer review.
Professional
Professional peer review focuses on the performance of practitioners, with a view to improving quality, maintaining standards, or providing certification. Henry Oldenburg (1619-1677) was a German-born British philosopher who is seen as the "father" of modern scientific peer review.
Professional peer review is common in the field of health care, where it is usually referred to as clinical peer review. In addition, since peer review activity is commonly segmented by clinical discipline, there is also peer review physicians, nursing peer review, dental peer review, etc. [6] Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting, law, engineering (for example, software peer review, technical peer review), aviation, and even wildfire management..
Academic
The peer review (also known as arbitration) is the process of submitting an author's academic work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of other experts in the same field, before an article is published that describes this work in a journal, conference records or as a book. The peer review helps the editor (i.e., the editor-in-chief, the editorial board or the program committee) to decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions or rejected.
The peer review requires a community of experts in a given field (and often closely defined), who are qualified and able to perform a reasonably impartial review. The peer review is generally considered necessary for academic quality and is used in most major academic publications, but in no way prevents the publication of invalid research. Weaknesses have also been identified in common peer review practices, leading critics to argue for reforms.
Several alternative peer review systems have been proposed to address known issues in the arbitration process. Traditionally, peer reviewers have been anonymous, but there are several examples of open peer review, where comments are visible to readers, usually with the identities of the reviewers also revealed, for example, F1000, eLife, BMJ and BioMed Central.In software development
Different software development methods include stages that involve arbitration. They include requirements definition, detailed design and code development. One of the very rigorous approaches is the so-called software inspection. In the free software movement, a procedure similar to arbitration is used, since whoever wishes can review, criticize and improve the software.
In this context, for the function of arbitration there is a counterpart: Linus's law, which is generally expressed as follows: «Given enough eyes, all error is superficial». This is interpreted as "With enough reviewers, any problem can be easily resolved." Eric S. Raymond, in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, reflects on the benefits of applying arbitration in software development, by virtue of the fact that it allows defects to be found much faster than by testing or by user reports about bugs. This minimizes time, effort and the inherent costs.
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