Isnât this more of a Macro and less of a Meme?
Well, what if youâre peerless, though, Maggie? 
Peer review as a way of helping authors increase the quality of their output is a great thing, when itâs actually functioning that way instead of as a toll gate.
Peer review as a credibility filter is just argument from authority; logically and ethically bankrupt. If it ainât in the King James it didnât happen - you can change the shibboleth and the attitude is still just as infantile.
I love the image, but I personally would only use it satirically to mock blind worshippers of peer review. Who will be along shortly, I expect.
Peer review and testable â preferably already tested â or it isnât science yet. Whether or not it happened is a separate matter.
Replication by an independent group, or thereâs no corroborating evidence that it happens?
Thatâs probably a better slogan.
Of course, like many accurate slogans, it fits poorly on a T-shirt.
Is my new t-shirt slogan.
I think my next t-shirt slogan will be ultrameta and say something like âhumorous but apt sloganâ.
Gregor Mendel happened.
Peer review should never be considered a sufficient hurdle for acceptance of a result or an idea in science, but it should certainly be considered a necessary hurdle. If you canât convince anyone in your field that your paper has enough merits even to be considered scientific, then youâre clearly failing at some very fundamental level to be practicing science.
So it certainly is a credibility filter, and sure, itâs an argument from authority. âArgument from authorityâ is one of the least-fallacious fallacies. The whole definition of an authority on a subject is someone who knows enough about it to have a basis for a judgement.
Why should I trust a peer-reviewed paper on climate science than a non-peer reviewed paper? Because the peers who are doing the reviewing know a lot more about the science behind climate science than I do.
Note that âpeer reviewedâ doesnât necessarily mean âpeer approvedâ. It means folks who have a clue have looked it over and flagged their concerns with it, so we know how large a grain/block/mine/ocean/planet of salt to take it with.
People who describe peer review as some sort of conspiracy usually see it as some sort of meta-conspiracy that is supposedly propping up a bunch of other conspiracies, while these same skeptics treat the wildest statements of conspiracy theory websites with complete credulity.
Now if we were to talk about the difficulty of getting funding for ideas outside of a narrowly defined range of conventional thought, thatâs another discussion entirely.
Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium. J. Electroanal.
Chem., 1989. 261: p. 301 âŚWent through peer review, not currently considered âSCIENCEâ by most.
How about âLet us peer review you, or hand somebody else the micâ? or something like that?
It met the minimum requirements of peer review, but the issue was repeatability, and whether it really worked. Likewise, I can patent a time machine that doesnât work, but I donât have to prove it works to get a patent.
These days you can just patent âconcept for a device that travels through timeâ and not have to worry about the details.
It did go through peer review, meaning that, if repeatable, the results were science. In that case, a whole lot of people were skeptical enough of the extraordinary claims that they decided to check the results themselves, and those results failed the test of reproducibility. As has been alluded to already, peer review is necessary for something to be considered science, but it is not necessarily sufficient. All kinds of crappy articles get through peer review, but, usually, only other specialists in the particular sub-discipline they are written in are in a position to determine this. If the article is only of interest to people in that discipline, word will get around, and it usually ends with that. If, as in the case of cold fusion, it is of interest to the general public, other scientists generally take the time to debunk it.
Wait, you can patent the fact that it doesnât work?
Runs off to patent our political process, abstinence education, homeopathy, and our patent system
Yeah. I mean imagine if you could just trade mark the words âTime Machineâ, that would be hilarious!
What matters is if I claim that it works because that is âthe scope of the patent claims.â
