The other thing worth looking at as an indicator (but not always!) of article quality is the journal in which it was published. Lazily recycling someone else’s ideas won’t get you published in Cell, Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) for example. But there are plenty of bottom feeding journals that will quite happily publish anything you like as long as you pay for it.

Of course even the big names aren’t perfect which is why it’s always a good idea to actually read the paper yourself and make your own judgement call as to the voracity of their claims. You may remember a few years back, NASA did a big press conference thingy about how a group they’d funded found evidence that bacteria on Earth could use arsenic in their DNA instead of phosphorous ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1 ). This was big news at the time because (had it been true) it would have completely overturned a scientific paradigm on life as we know it. As it stands, the paper itself is total garbage. It’s full of sloppy methodology and bad reasoning, making their conclusions utterly worthless. Where was it published? PNAS of course…

And we can’t use the RealPeerreview twitter feed as evidence that the humanities are <Private Frazer>doomed</Private Frazer> either, since the anonymous individual behind the account is clearly cherry-picking the most entertainingly ridiculous ones.

Yes, yes you are

It’s rather unfortunate that ‘peer review’ has been held up as some kind of banner standard for the identification of ‘worthwhile’ research, when the fact is all you have to do to pass is not have obviously sloppy methodology (and even plenty of those make it through).

That’s not to say it isn’t important – but it’s frustrating that, at least in the communication of the sciences, it’s often used as an appeal to authority. It’s a real shame because the real appeal of the sciences is the methodology employed, which is almost never covered outside the disciplines themselves. Promoting an appeal to authority as a surrogate to critical thinking is doomed to failure.