Paradigms and Revolutions in Science
Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book "How Economists Will Destroy Capitalism"
The public has a justified belief that refereed academic papers are held to a much higher standard than newspaper columns. After all, academic referees, with their years of study and doctorates in the relevant fields, should surely have far more knowledge in their specific field than any newspaper subeditor could hope to have. So then, why did Nordhaus’s egregious errors—forgetting that opencut mining is exposed to the weather, ignoring that ground-based transportation systems are exposed to the weather, and classifying imports and exports as unaffected by the weather—end up in a refereed academic paper?
To understand how this happened, you need to know how refereeing functions, both in the wider academic community, and also in the peculiar confines of the discipline of economics—which I cover in the next chapter.
When a paper is submitted to an academic journal, the editor will firstly decide whether the paper fits the remit of the journal, and then effectively skim read it to decide whether it reaches his or her minimum standards for quality. If it does, then the paper is sent to academics who have previously published on the same topic, with a request that they referee the paper for the journal. Refereeing is a purely voluntary, unpaid activity, so the academics approached by the editor can decline the task.
Once two or more referees accept the editor’s request, the referees read the paper and assess its argument. Each referee will give written feedback on the paper to both the editor and the author, along with a recommendation to the editor which can range from “publish as is”, to advising the editor that the author needs to make substantial revisions to the paper, to outright rejection of the paper.
This process can be extremely useful for both the author of and readers of an academic paper. Refereeing can catch errors that the author missed, and also provide feedback to an author which improves their argument. Most published papers go through one round of editing as a result of feedback from referees, and quite a few undergo two or more rounds before the final version is approved by the referees, and later published by the journal. I have had this positive experience from refereeing myself on many occasions.
However, refereeing can also ensure that views that are outside the mainstream of a discipline are not published, even though they may later be proved to be correct, while mainstream views do get published, even though they may later be proved to be false.
