Replies to post #17028 on The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

It is nominally peer-reviewed but the peer-review system is quite broken - at least in the earth sciences. In the immediate case the economics may be bad for the purported application but the science might b fine. Conversely, until recently I worked with an individual who was a prolific publisher but his models are frequently unreproducible and statistical nonsense and his experiments contain things other than what he reported in his papers. However, all of his work purportedly made it thru an internal review process and then the journal peer-review. Some of that work may eventually be retracted as a consequence of my ‘suggestions’ that people might want to look at things more deeply but that doesn’t negate the fact that obvious flaws either escaped peer exposure prior to publication or the peer-reviewers intentionally ignored those flaws. The perspective of some scientists is that “some people need to have their incompetence exposed”. I don’t think that latter approach works well because many managers/Deans/granting agencies simply count publications.