The promises and pitfalls of peer review

09/24/20 • 38 min

This week’s podcast focuses on Peer Review Week, an annual event honouring the vital role that peer review plays in maintaining the quality of published scientific papers. But while peer review is important, it’s certainly not perfect. The quality of reviews is not always up to scratch – as the darkly comic website Shit My Reviewers Say demonstrates. The pool of peer reviewers is nowhere near as diverse as the scientific community itself. And the many helpful, conscientious reviewers aren’t getting the rewards and recognition they deserve.

Joining us to talk about these challenges (and strategies for addressing them) are Kim Eggleton, the Research Integrity and Inclusion Manager at IOP Publishing (which publishes Physics World), and Bahar Mehmani, who is Reviewer Experience Lead at the scientific publishing giant Elsevier. Kim and Bahar also discuss how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting peer review. With so much at stake for public health, the need for published scientific research to be as accurate, robust and transparent as possible has never been greater.

Previous Episode

Evidence for life is found on Venus, creating wider access to the best radiotherapy

In this episode the astronomy writer Keith Cooper is on hand to chat about the surprising discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. He explains that here on Earth, microbial life is the only natural source of phosphine – which could mean that life exists in the clouds of Venus. Cooper also speculates about how future missions to the “habitable zone” of the Venusian atmosphere could search for life.

Today, there is a huge disparity in cancer care across the world with people living in low- and middle-income countries having limited access to the best radiotherapy treatments. This imbalance is the focus of the social enterprise company EmpowerRT, which was founded by the University of North Carolina medical physicist Sha Chang. In this episode, Chang and her colleague Cielle Collins talk to Physics World’s Tami Freeman about what can be done to provider greater access to the best treatments.

Next Episode

Why Google builds quantum computers, the LGBT+ experience in physics, CERN’s carbon footprint

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast Google’s Sergio Boixo explains why the tech giant is building its own quantum computers. Boixo will be a plenary speaker at the upcoming Quantum 2020 virtual conference, and we will be interviewing other plenary speakers in future episodes of the podcast.

Next up is Ramon Barthelemy – a physicist at the University of Utah who has surveyed more than 300 LGBT+ physicists about their careers. Barthelemy chats with Physics World’s Matin Durrani about the survey and the issues faced by the LGBT+ physics community, which are also described in a paper in the European Journal of Physics.

CERN is home to the world’s largest particle collider and several experiments that are the size of small office blocks. So, it is not unexpected that the Geneva-based lab has a large carbon footprint. What is surprising, however, is the main source of CERN’s greenhouse gas emissions – as the science writer Kate Ravilious explains in the final segment of the podcast.