As an Editor of the journal Development, I often hear complaints about peer review. We all know the problems – from lengthy review times to requests for seemingly unnecessary experiments. I agree with many of these complaints. Katherine Brown (Executive Editor of Development) and I recently wrote an editorial about this in which we talk about some of the things Development is doing to mitigate the worst of the problems.
But writing this editorial made we reflect on the positives of peer review. Despite the well-documented problems, I think peer review serves an invaluable role, but one that is often under appreciated.
There have been calls to abandon peer review in favour of simply posting preprints. But while I’m in favour of preprints – I think they accelerate the dissemination of scientific knowledge and reduce some of the gratuitous gatekeeping activity that peer review can generate – I believe that relying solely on preprints would ignore the fundamental role that peer review plays in scientific discourse and the building of fields.
Peer review serves as more than just a gateway to publication – it actively shapes the standards, methods, and theoretical frameworks that define scientific fields. When reviewers evaluate manuscripts, they engage in a dialogue with authors and editors about what constitutes sufficient evidence for specific claims, which questions are of interest, and how new findings integrate with established knowledge. It is this dialogue that creates and maintains coherent scientific fields.
This scientific dialogue begins even before manuscript submission. As authors, we write our papers with peer review in mind, anticipating questions, criticisms and potential alternative interpretations. Anticipating peer review helps maintain consistent standards across a field and ensures that new work engages with and builds meaningfully on existing foundations. The peer review process creates a shared understanding of what constitutes valid experimental design, appropriate controls, and reasonable conclusions within specific research fields.
Arguably, facilitating peer review is the most important contribution journals make to scientific progress. Without this structured evaluation system, scientific fields risk fragmentation. In a purely preprint-based world, where papers are posted without the expectation of peer review, the collective standards that bind research communities together could erode. Different research groups might adopt diverging methodological approaches or make claims based on varying levels of evidence, making it increasingly difficult to compare and build upon each other’s work. This fragmentation would ultimately impede scientific progress by compromising the ability of researchers to effectively communicate and collaborate.
Peer review also plays a crucial role in maintaining the integrity of scientific fields over time. Through evaluation of new papers, reviewers help ensure that published work meets established standards while remaining open to innovative approaches and challenging findings. This balance between conservation and progress allows fields to evolve systematically, incorporating new discoveries without losing the foundation of previous work.
The process also serves an important educational function, helping train new generations of scientists in field-specific standards and practices. Through receiving and responding to reviewer feedback, researchers develop a deeper understanding of their field’s methodological requirements and theoretical frameworks. This training aspect of peer review helps maintain consistency and quality across generations of scientists.
While we should certainly strive to improve the peer review process, its fundamental role in maintaining scientific fields and facilitating progress should not be underestimated. Rather than abandoning peer review, we should continue working to enhance its efficiency and fairness while preserving its essential function as a cornerstone of scientific dialogue. The future of scientific progress depends not just on new discoveries, but on maintaining the coherent, collaborative framework that peer review helps to provide. Science isn’t only individual discoveries – it’s about building something bigger together and peer review is an important component of the glue that binds us together.
Briscoe Lab 