Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 2. The Research on Refereeing and Alternatives to the Present System

Continuing our discussion of refereeing, which focused on complaints about the system in Part 1,1 we now examine the empirical research on the subject, the anecdotal literature supporting the current system, and some of the suggestions for improving it. Part 3 will appear at a later date and will discuss the peer review of grant proposals. Again we will review the considerable literature of opinion and conjecture, but we will give special attention to the large-scale study by sociologists Stephen Cole, State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook, and Jonathan R. Cole, Columbia University, New York,J,J as well as other papersq and special reports. j