Usually, it's only a few reviewers who look at an article. The reasons it fails are similar to the reasons any human process falls down. That conclusion has been arrived at in experiments like this one or this one and systematic reviews that bring together all the relevant studies, like this one and this one. Researchers who have examined peer review often find evidence that it works barely better than chance at keeping poor-quality studies out of journals or that it doesn't work at all. All too often, peer review misses big problems with studies
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Since then, other researchers have been uncovering more and more problems with the peer review process, raising the question of why scientists bother with it in the first place. The finding, though published more than 30 years ago, is still relevant. Were these, in fact, seriously flawed papers that got accepted and published? Can bad papers squeak through depending on who reviews them? Did some papers get in because of the prestige of their authors or affiliations? At the very least, the experiment suggested the peer review process was unnervingly inconsistent. This raised a number of disquieting possibilities. In many cases, they said the articles had "serious methodological flaws." Nearly 90 percent of the peer reviewers who looked at the resubmitted articles recommended against publication this time.
![manuscript revisions crossword manuscript revisions crossword](http://www.bl.uk/IllImages/Ekta/thm/E075/E075124.jpg)
What Peters and Ceci found was surprising. If the process worked well, the studies that were published the first time would be approved for publication again the second time around.
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In theory, these papers should have been high quality - they'd already made it into these prestigious publications. The researchers then altered the names and university affiliations on the journal manuscripts and resubmitted the papers to the same journal.