Peer review

Pre-publication scrutiny of a manuscript by independent researchers in the field — a filter for obvious flaws, not a guarantee that a paper's findings are correct.

Peer review is the process by which a journal sends a submitted manuscript to independent researchers in the same field, who assess its methods, analysis and conclusions before publication. Papers described as peer-reviewed have passed that scrutiny; preprints, conference abstracts and vendor white papers have not, which is a structural difference worth noticing when sources are compared.

What the filter catches is bounded. Reviewers read what authors report; they do not re-run experiments, audit raw data, or reliably detect fabrication. Reviewed papers are corrected and sometimes retracted, and journals vary widely in rigour. Peer review is therefore a floor — the work was plausible to qualified readers — rather than a verdict that its findings are true, and replication across independent groups remains the stronger signal.

The practical reading habit follows: weight a claim by where it sits on the evidence ladder and whether it has been replicated, not by the bare fact of publication. The research library on this site cites peer-reviewed literature by its identifiers, includes negative and null results rather than filtering them, and excludes retracted papers — the checks that publication status alone does not perform.

For research purposes only. Not for human consumption, diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of any condition. Nothing on this page is medical advice.