[mattkrause]

It’s trust.

Specifically, you need to trust that when the authors claim to have reared mice in a high-oxygen environment, trained a monkey to move a joystick, or whatever the paper says, they did something like that. You can—-and should—-ask to see data demonstrating that they did it well, like oxygen levels in the mouse cage or trajectories produced by the monkey. However, unless those values are bizarre, it’s virtually impossible to know if they’re real or completely made up. Realistically, no one is going to fly you out so you can “audit” an experiment or record and review thousands of hours of surveillance footage.

[chiefalchemist]

When the act is mutually beneficial to both it's not trust. There is a clear incentive here for the reviewer to be less than thorough.

Put another way, the starting hypothesis sound be: this study is flawed. The reviewer should then approach it as such.

Not only isn't it trust. It's a violation of the scientific method. Yeah, sadly ironic (read: hypocritical).

[mattkrause]

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be skeptical. The reviewers’ job is to ask whether the approach used and data collected make sense and if so, whether and how well they support the authors’ claims.

At the same time, peer review is meant to be an advisory process, not an adversarial one. You should certainly flag things that seem problematic, and ideally offer solutions, but you’re not expected to—-and cannot, really—-tear down the experiment and root out every possible mistake or malfeasance. All you’ve got is a day or so and a 6000 word description of the project, so if the manuscript claims that the mouse weighed 12.3 grams, you’ve basically got to take that number at face value. Trust might be too strong of a word—-you could certainly question a weight of 123 grams, which is improbably large—-but you should at least start in equipoise with respect to some stuff.

I also don’t see the mutual benefit, beyond nebulous things like enjoying consensus. A short review is also easier to write than a long one, but it’s just as easy to be dismissive as uncritical. Reviews are usually unsigned—-and the authors and reviewers may not even know each other[0] so it’s hard for there to be an explicit quid pro quo.

[0] Of the stuff I reviewed in 2019, I knew exactly one of the authors, and here ‘knew’ means ‘Once amiably chatted with them in a coffee line at a conference’.

[SlowRobotAhead]

Asking “does this make sense” when it’s monkey trained to use joystick is something very different than trying to question and confirm “our model which is entirely based on these 40 other models which were all results of estimations of samples taken over the last 100 years then extrapolated out”... you can ask to see the monkey using the joystick.

The model verification would be years of work - so everyone just “trusts” it’s right, although we basically know it’s not because the chance it isn’t is just much more likely.

It doesn’t have to be a quid pro quo any more than it has to be “ugh, that sounds really boring to confirm, I’ll just believe it”.

[cgiles]

When you review a paper, no one knows who you are except the editor of the journal. If there are any incentives at all for the reviewer, it is not to be arsed to review at all, since it takes time and you get nothing out of it.

There is some truth to the idea that some reviewers are lazy and don't bother to examine the paper as well as they should because that takes time. But when they do that, it irritates the editor, who is trying to make an informed decision on the paper, so they get bad karma for that.

If you want to be cynical and look for community politics, you should be directing your wrath at study sections / grant review panels. That is a totally different ball game and there is a fair amount of corruption there. Peer review may be imperfect and prone to some cognitive biases, but it is not generally corrupt.