[msrenee]

>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 The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them.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.

[cauch]

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.

Let's rather say: let's double-check everything.

[msrenee]

>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?

[cauch]

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.