Letter to the Editor

RE: BONNIE WHEELER, 'THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SCHOLARLY JOURNAL AND THE PLACE OF PEER REVIEW,' JSP 42, 3 (APRIL 2011): 307-22

Bonnie Wheeler follows her deft discussion of the scholarly journal with a hesitant defence of peer review, a process that when successful (that is, when an article is eventually accepted and published) ostensibly affirms its worth, thereby confirming the author's value as a researcher—an articulate disseminator of his or her discoveries—and, by illogical extension within the academy, his or her value as an instructor. Wheeler places all of this within a credentialing framework.

I have no real problem with this, if that is how she chooses to structure matters, but in reality, peer-reviewed publication does not produce a credential, nor does it effectively act as a credentialing process. Earning a doctorate in entomology, passing an examination to become a professional engineer, or graduating from the Culinary Institute of America yields a true credential. Publishing a fifty-page disquisition in PMLA may be laudable and add another line or two on one's bibliography, but it is not really a form of credentialing.

This is a minor but important point because it allows one to infuse peer review with an asset it does not deserve.

Journal peer review is a system frequently (though not always) applied in the hard sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology), where the substantive content in a general disciplinary area is so broad and diverse that an editor is incapable of making judicious decisions; and even in this context peer review may be superfluous. Social scientists— especially psychologists but others too—have long dreamed of investigations that yield the kind of absolute data that a physicist routinely derives (although again, not always), and so from social science's modern inception, these scholars have brazenly but foolishly imitated the methodologies of the hard sciences in order to add prestige to their work and in the hope that their human subjects would produce reliable, valid, and generally inducible data. But this never works in the social sciences (especially not in flawed experiments, investigations, or ethnographic research) because humans are not merely gravitationally manipulated electrons; and it may even fail dismally in the hard sciences—for example, in clinical trials where Andrew Wakefield induced from a population of twelve children his general conclusion that a vaccine causes autism!).

So naturally, if all of these other highly respected scholars misapply peer review, so should musicologists, art historians, philosophers, and literary theorists and critics. This is a big mistake. First, peer review is unnecessary in the case of pointed journals, those that deal with a precise subject, such as medieval emblems, Browning's poetry, the literary essay, or the passion play. A well-versed and competent editor in his or her field of expertise is equipped to make judicious decisions on apposite submitted papers. An essay on Sherlock Holmes's knowledge of cigar tobacco presented to the Chaucer Review would be rejected out of hand, not sent out for review. One dealing with the worthy knight, unless bizarrely eccentric, should present no problems for someone who has assumed the editorship of a publication dealing exclusively with Chaucer. If it does, then he or she may turn to a board member for informal advice. Why burden the publisher, editor, academic reviewers, and authors with all of this bizarrely bureaucratic, time-consuming, inefficient, and expensive nonsense only to accept the piece against the reviewers' recommendations or reject it despite the encomiums?

In addition to its frequent superfluity in the humanities, peer review is riddled with so many inherent flaws and problems (the American Medical Association has held six conferences devoted exclusively to peer review and published the results in JAMA) that it is probably more of a detriment, regardless of the good that it may sometimes accomplish. One of these ostensible goods is the tendered feedback offered to the author who then (sometimes) revises and thus improves the work. For thirty years I have advised colleagues, readers, and even graduate students to show their work to an appropriate person he or she respects and...