The four-schools article is excellent, and I would add to it a more sociological perspective on why peer review of various sorts is so central to research. The piece cited below was just published this month and it gets very productively at ways of defining peer review. Here are the 3 interrelated roles of peer review they theorize: “first, as a mechanism to assess quality through expert judgement (process); second, to decide on the distribution of scarce resources, e.g. publication space (outcome); and, third, to self-govern science (context).”

For the quick intro to peer review, it would be easy to show students how they have been subject to the first 2 roles when their school work was graded: quality assessment by an expert, which distributes resources (say, entry to college). They likely did not get to participate, as full-fledged community members, in the governance of their schooling.

If students get the purpose behind why scientists engage in peer review, there’s a shot they might see that finding peer-reviewed scholarship is not just a random requirement by their professor. And it might help the rest of us to better appreciate why the debates over peer review are irresolvable and that the endeavor continues on nonetheless (and even through the debates themselves).

Martin Reinhart, Cornelia Schendzielorz, Peer-review procedures as practice, decision, and governance—the road to theories of peer review, Science and Public Policy, 2024, scad089, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scad089

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