I don’t think that’s an especially difficult thing to do. It seems any paper dealing with social sciences or history that fits the current narrative is lauded and “reviewed” favorably. I think the mechanism which facilitates this is relatively simple and similar to how USSR officials would rather bring good news than bad facts
I provide language revision for academics who are non-native speakers of English, so I read a hell of a lot of papers, theses, and grant applications, while also continuing to publish and peer-review in my own field. My impression is that peer review in the social sciences and history isn’t necessarily the major force for conformance to whatever contemporary social narratives. Papers often deal with minutiae, and both author and peer reviewers alike are nerds who like delving into those minutiae. They don’t necessarily want to be drawn into any wider topic like in the case of the paper discussed in this article.
Rather, the force for ideological conformity may instead be funding bodies. I have seen so many grant applications where the author(s) clearly want to explore minutiae, but are forced to appeal to some grand social-justice cause in order to secure funding. I’ve participated through series of revisions of grant applications where 2–3 paragraphs claiming the research would benefit some minority or another, are inserted at a late stage after someone mentions that the application would stand no chance without them.
> claiming the research would benefit some minority or another, are inserted at a late stage after someone mentions that the application would stand no chance without them.
Funny, it's similar to "forced" mentions of Marxism inserted apparently at will in social science books/papers written in Romanian back when the Wall was still up. Towards the later years of the communist government being in power those Marx insertions had been replaced by quotes to what Ceausescu had said.
I guess the OP is referring to how communist countries are/were big in personality cult and general brainwashing. Marx and his ideology when they were happy with the soviets, Ceausescu later when the political winds changed.
Generally though, people have a tendency to seek flags to rally behind, be it personalities, ideologies or religions. There is nothing surprising on that, given that the success of our species relies on coordinating large numbers of people. The problem is that, sometimes, it is very difficult or impossible for the individual to choose the "right" flag, whatever the definition of right may be. In communist and totalitarian countries, the problem is solved for the individual by allowing only one flag. In countries with good democracy, e.g. USA[^1], it sometimes happens that the population divides evenly between the flags available to them (i.e. Republicans and Democrats).
[^1]: The US' democracy has many faults, but it's a shining thing compared with a lot of countries in the world.
> Marx and his ideology when they were happy with the soviets, Ceausescu later when the political winds changed.
Exactly that.
If it matters, and while we're talking history of ideology, towards the latter years of the Ceausescu government real and genuine "local" Marxists had been sidelined almost completely, meanwhile there was a push for inter-war nationalism veering into what today would be called far-right.
The 6th volume of the "Military history of the Romanian people", published in 1989 under the editorship of one of Ceausescu's brothers, had details of the Romanian Army's involvement on the Eastern Front during WW2, meaning while we were on the Germans' side and fighting against the Soviets, on Soviet land. That had been considered more than taboo until then.
But how could the reviewers have found the errors in this article?
The article can tell "Cort was informed about the new techniques from a family member back from Jamaica". How do you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them. It's a huge work.
This article was later debunked by experts who have taken time and effort to do that. But peer-reviewing does not allow reviewers to pause they own work to do such extensive checks.
More realistically, the article passes the peer-reviewing process because the peer-reviewing process does what it is supposed to do: the article is "believable", it does not have things that looks not coming from the scientific process. The reviewers don't have time and it is in fact not even their jobs to redo the study. All they do is to check if the guidelines seem to be respected. If you want more than that, you want a "replication study", which is the next step in the scientific process of building trust on a study (and which also have difficulties).
And, sure, they may have flagged that some conclusions may need more convincing demonstration, but it is a Gaussian curve: sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, some passes through the gaps.
I think there is a problem with layman people who don't understand that the peer review process is not a magical tool that remove all the incorrect studies (on top of that, due to statistical fluctuation, some studies are false while the authors have done 100% everything perfectly).
I'm not saying it's the case here, but this is one explanation that should not be ignored.
Ironically, it is a bit funny that for your conclusion you jumped immediately on the story you wish to be true: social sciences or history are ideologically biased. This is a valid hypothesis, but not the only one explaining what we observe.
> This article was later debunked by experts who have taken time and effort to do that
It was debunked by a single non-academic with no publishing track record, who is currently completing a master's thesis. In other words it could have been debunked by anyone.
> the article passes the peer-reviewing process because the peer-reviewing process does what it is supposed to do
Indeed, it passed the process because the process is designed to create the illusion of consensus and credibility without actually blocking false claims. It worked wonderfully here.
> I think there is a problem with layman people
Yes that's right, those unwashed masses who expect scholars to not make shit up, who are these scoundrels? Do they not understand how the great processes of discovery work?
> social sciences or history are ideologically biased. This is a valid hypothesis, but not the only one explaining what we observe.
Yes it is the only one explaining what we observe. The claims were made up, completed with fake references, there is no scope for statistical P-hacking "oh bad luck old boy" explanations here (not that they're acceptable anyway).
It's not just scholars, the whole left is like this. Black Woman With Magical Powers is by now a Netflix trope. You can guess the plot of a lot of post-2015 Hollywood output just by looking at the race of the characters. This sort of scam is exactly what we'd expect from an academic culture in a state of advanced decay.
I was with you on most of your points until you extrapolated this to "the left" and rolled on into Netflix shows as evidence of the degradation of academia due to politics you don't agree with.
>How do you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them. It's a huge work.
Sorry, but if the paper doesn't make its case, it isn't an academic work. If it needs to be 1,000 papers in order to explain why its assertions are reliable, great, that's 1,000 good papers to write. :)*
...by actually reviewing the citations and noticing they do not, at all, support the claims she made.
> ...such extensive checks...
The checks didn't need to be extensive, they needed to be cursory. The problem is they were absent because the reviewers enjoyed the same political bent as the author of the paper.
>The article can tell "Cort was informed about the new techniques from a family member back from Jamaica". How do you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them. It's a huge work.
You start by going through the citations the author has listed and seeing if those support their reasoning. Sounds like that's what the non-expert in the linked article did. It turned out that some of what she claimed was not supported by or was in direct opposition to the sources in her citations. That's what citations are for. They're listed at the end of the paper in a standardized way so they can be easily accessed by anyone who wants to know where an author got a piece of information from.
If this wasn't possible, there would be no point to peer review. I can understand an article getting through where the author falsified experimental data. That's hard to refute unless you can find evidence of the false data or you run the experiment again yourself. A history article, though? If you're not double-checking dubious claims by see what sources the author is using to support them, you may as well not bother reviewing.
I agree with checking the references, but again, my point is that as a general rule it's really not that easy. You can think it's easy because you have had the work done for you for this particular article and that it is obvious in this particular article, but in general, it is way more complicated.
Properly checking that the citation is indeed saying that often requires studying the quoted paper quite in details. Again, it may not have been the case here, but it is an amount of work that a reviewer should plan in advance.
But more importantly, and it makes your point moot: if the article is misrepresentating the reference, then, rather than in the peer-review process, it will be the reference author that will notice it.
I think it is my point: people here are seeing peer-review and are thinking that it is the ultimate method to decide what is good or bad (or what is "consensus"). This is ridiculous. A peer-reviewed article has NEVER been considered as "obviously correct and uncriticable". A peer-review is just one of the step in the long process. If indeed the references were not saying what the article is saying they say, it will end up being discovered.
The peer-review is the first step before submitting the article to the whole community, and it is then that the majority of the discussion happens.
> If you're not double-checking dubious claims
While I agree with the previous things, this bit makes me pause: careful with that, historically, the majority of correct claims were, at first, sounding dubious, and the majority of incorrect claims were, at first, sounding totally not dubious.
>I agree with checking the references, but again, my point is that as a general rule it's really not that easy. You can think it's easy because you have had the work done for you for this particular article and that it is obvious in this particular article, but in general, it is way more complicated.
It is that easy to check a reference. The only real obstacle is whether you have access to an article cited, which any reviewer will through their university or organization. Find the article cited by the paper under review as referenced in work using the title, author, and year published. Read article. Done it a million times myself. Books are obviously going to take longer to double-check and very old articles might be hard to access. Studying the "quoted paper" (Although it often won't be a direct quote. That would be even easier to check on.) is an important part of reviewing. This isn't supposed to be a 5-minute read-through to be given a thumbs-up if it seems alright. It should take time to ensure that it makes a valid point using verifiable facts.
>But more importantly, and it makes your point moot: if the article is misrepresentating the reference, then, rather than in the peer-review process, it will be the reference author that will notice it.
The reference author isn't going through every work that cites theirs. It could be they notice, but it's more likely they never see the work. If the paper author is misrepresenting the reference, that's the peer-reviewer's job to catch it.
>The peer-review is the first step before submitting the article to the whole community, and it is then that the majority of the discussion happens.
The peer-review is the last step before submitting the article to the whole community. What do you think the point of the peer review is? It's not a rubber stamp. It's supposed to be other researchers who are capable of spotting a work which isn't supported by facts and the references cited.
>While I agree with the previous things, this bit makes me pause: careful with that, historically, the majority of correct claims were, at first, sounding dubious, and the majority of incorrect claims were, at first, sounding totally not dubious.
So you shouldn't look into questionable claims because sometimes false claims sound perfectly believable?
It is easy to check one reference. It is not easy to check all the reference, and read the whole article, and check each paragraph, and check that there is no flaw in the logic, and check that there is no hypothesis missed, and check that ...
My point is that when you peer-review, you usually choose your priorities (unless you don't do much work next to that). Sure, it's not good that the review of the references was not done perfectly. But it's just unrealistic to think that references are always reviewed perfectly and that if you spot one article with badly reviewed reference, it's the proof that the reviewers were part of an ideological conspiracy. It's a survivor fallacy: you see here a bad article where the reference is wrong, but you don't see all of the work of checking everything else. If you were presented with another bad article where the most obvious flaw was something else, you would have said "the reviewers are so bad, checking this particular element would have me taken 5 minutes" and you would not even have considered to check the references yourself for this particular example.
Honestly, checking the content of the reference is a low gain job with respect to the effort. Because citing a reference incorrectly is very risky (there is a strong probability the authors will notice, and it looks very very bad when they tell it then), it is pretty rare that checking the reference really lead to a correction, and it is not unusual that the reviewers assume that the authors are of good faith and missed something more subtle rather than got it so wrong. It does not mean it does not happen, and again, in an ideal case, the reference should be checked. But there are plenty of things that can be missed during a review, and checking everything is a real effort that is usually not worth it.
> The reference author isn't going through every work that cites theirs.
That seems stupid: they are building work around a specific subject. If they are going to read one article, it will be an article on a related subject. And what better relation than a relation that lead to a reference?
In other words: what are these authors doing if they are not reading the articles that talk to related subject? Can you even call those authors experts: they have read few article, they wrote one article, and since then, they have totally abandon their research and ignored all the new elements that bring a more precise and advanced light on the subject.
It's also a strange argument: in one hand, you say it's easy to read the article that need to be reviewed + all the article that are in its reference. In the other hand, you are explaining that it's too much work for an author to read one article.
And also, it's not only reading: 90% of research is about debating between researchers. That's the whole point of conferences and seminars. Either the reviewed article is totally ignored, in which case who care if the references are wrong, or it is not ignored, and the most it is not ignored, the most it is exposed to people for which an incorrect reference will be obvious.
> The peer-review is the last step before submitting the article to the whole community.
Exactly. And what is the point of submitting the article to the whole community: create the debate and the discussion, bringing new arguments that are then being disputed, refuted, ... until we get a new position that we trust.
The point of peer review is a basic first filter. The goal of this filter is excluding articles that, at 100%, are not worth the time to be discussed (or not yet worth the time). But this filter NEEDS to let some bad articles pass. The goal of this filter is to be 100% sure that the article is not worth before rejecting it. But as long as the rate of articles is manageable, then there is no reason to make this filter too stringent. It's just dangerous: rather have 100 bad articles passing peer-review than 1 good articles failing peer-review.
> So you shouldn't look into questionable claims because sometimes false claims sound perfectly believable?
It is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you should not bias yourself by your preconception: be critical of EVERYTHING, it does not matter if it sounds correct or sounds incorrect. Sounding correct or sounding incorrect is a really really bad way of knowing if something is correct or incorrect. It even creates unconscious biases where we end up thinking something false should be treated as if it was proven.
> The article can tell "Cort was informed about the new techniques from a family member back from Jamaica". How do you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them. It's a huge work.
Since this is about checking textual references, as opposed to laboratory work, would it be possible for an LLM to do that? Seems like the hardest thing would be for the A.I. to log into the requisite gateways for the databases hosting the papers.
I doubt it is so naively simple as "querying a database". For example, before the publication of this article, the majority of the "databases" were simply saying "the inventor is Cort", which is one example of thing that the A.I. will get trivially "wrong" when reviewing the paper.
And if it is true, then this A.I. review method can also be applied to mathematics, theoretical physics, computer science, ...
And even if it is doable, you will still have things that will pass the review process when ideally it should not. It is just an hard limitation, same as the one in "justice" (impossible to not sometimes judge a guilty person "innocent" or an innocent person "guilty", anyone who thinks otherwise just don't understand how complicated it is)
It probably can be done, but does the academic establishment really want word to get out that their great research is being auto-reviewed because the "peers" were so bad at their job that an AI can do better? They've spent decades pushing the idea that peer review is a gold standard on the world, it would be quite a climbdown to admit ChatGPT can do it better.
> This article was later debunked by experts who have taken time and effort to do that. But peer-reviewing does not allow reviewers to pause they own work to do such extensive checks.
Except you made that accusation up. In all likelihood, you do not know how censorship in USSR functioned (because the hints you provide suggest so). And in all likelihood, you know zero about what is in historical articles or how peer review functions.
I don’t think that’s an especially difficult thing to do. It seems any paper dealing with social sciences or history that fits the current narrative is lauded and “reviewed” favorably. I think the mechanism which facilitates this is relatively simple and similar to how USSR officials would rather bring good news than bad facts