Taking peer review seriously

Abstract

The peer‐review system for validating and judging the quality of scientific discoveries has come under attack during the past years. Daniel Fisher and Nikolaos Parisis reckoned that “publishing has become the most discouraging and frustrating part of research” [1] because the amount of data needed to write a publishable paper has drastically increased “during the past decades” owing to increasing demands by reviewers and editors. Ultimately, they state, this hampers scientific advance and harms the career options of young scientists. In his comment on their essay, Haitham Sobhy takes the same line and criticizes that the focus on journal impact factor (JIF) and number of citations to measure scientific quality may ruin or at least negatively …