Challenges for Peer Review

Peer review is not a fraud detection system. Referees are likely to detect some wrongdoing, such as copying someone else’s research or misrepresenting data, because they care about their subject. They know what research has been conducted already and the kinds of results that are likely. However, if someone deliberately sets out to falsify data, there is sometimes no way of knowing this until the paper is published and others in the scientific community scrutinise and try to repeat the work.