Kim van der Linde wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
All fields work by consensus. Grant committees, journal editors and reviewers, PhD committees, all of these act via consensus.
Well, either Wikipedia or you are wrong. Make your choice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus#Examples_of_non-consensus
The peer review article points out that this varies by journal and field. In computer science, for example, the process typically *is* consensus driven: Reviewers write reviews; authors can write short rebuttals; and the reviewers then discuss among themselves to reach a decision.
In other fields the final decision is made solely by the editor, so it's more of a degenerate case of consensus-of-one.
-Mark