Now More Than Ever: Reflections on the State and Importance of Peer Review

The process of peer review is a long-upheld ritual practiced across academic disciplines, intended to enforce standards of scholarship and rigor in what work is reported, and what gets to count as knowledge. As John Saultz noted, peer review is the "epistemological foundation standing between authors and readers of scientiWc papers." It is certainly a time-consuming effort on the part of reviewers, and when performed speciWcally for scholarly journals, it is generally performed without compensation. As a recent study by Anderson and Ledford demonstrated, however, a world without peer review would be harmful; the rapid diffusion of withdrawn or refuted hypotheses inWltrating the social and professional world could have life-and-death implications.