Delirium wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Actually, it's sort of interesting that this is news. While it's common practice to have peer review for scholarly books, the "peer" part of the term should be a hint that it's not the publisher doing the checking! My guess is that our reverence for the printed page is such that we just assume no one would dare to print without being certain of its correctness.
In many fields the peer-review of even scholarly books is not all that high. In the sciences, journal articles hold much more weight than books, because there's a perception that anybody can get a book published.
I'm not so sure that the peer review of journal articles is necessarily that much better. I recently dealt with a situation in which the submitter of an article was able to specifically request that his article not be forwarded to one of the logical candidates for peer-reviewing it, because he anticipated that this person would give an unfavorable review. Cherry-picking your reviews hardly counts as rigorous scholarship in my book.
The theory of peer review is nice, but even in academia the execution is often shoddy and politically skewed. Practices at different journals vary, of course, so the reputation of the journal needs to be considered beyond just the question of whether it qualifies as peer-reviewed.
--Michael Snow