A recent article in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences questions the validity of the peer review process. Peer review, according to the article, is a flawed process that is subject to intense political, social, and financial pressures that can distort outcome and affect which articles are published and which are rejected--and ultimately stymie scientific progress. A most serious problem is lack of agreement between reviewers (or in psychology parlance low inter-rater reliability) which, as we all learned in graduate school, severely limits validity. According to an article on Biomednet, "...the conclusions are alarmingly clear. For one journal, the relationships among the reviewers' opinions were no better than that obtained by chance. For the other journal, the relationship was only fractionally better. "

Read the entire article in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, Vol. 22, No. 2, February 2001.