The peer review process was developed to help journal editors decide which manuscripts deemed suitable for publishing. Eventually, the process evolved and transitioned from its initial unidirectional purpose of assessing papers for accuracy to evaluating papers with an intent to uphold the integrity of research study before publication.
Today, the peer review process is at the helm of ensuring that a scientific manuscript is experimentally and ethically correct. Furthermore, it determines which papers meet a journal’s standard of quality and confirms originality before publication.
It is now a practice by most credible scientific research journals and plays an imperative role in determining the credibility and quality of submitted work.
Learn more about the lesser known facts about the evolution of the peer review process.
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Peer review is a good idea but it’s becoming an unsupervised mess. I live in Thailand where I edit medical papers, and I get all kinds of ‘peer reviews’ where the reviewers have poor English and thus both comment incorrectly and also offer comments that are simply not understandable. And it’s quite common for ‘reviewer A’ to say this is a fine manuscript that should be published, and ‘reviewer B’ to say the exact reverse, for this reason or that the manuscript should not be published, leading to considerable consternation among my Thai writers who really want to please the reviewers and get published. There needs to be some ‘adult supervision’ added to the reviewing process to make it work as it was/is intended.