Still following my previous post, “The European Commission Highlights an Uncomfortable Truth: Science Depends on Essential Labour Academia Fails to Reward”, an article published in Nature on 20 October exposes a further institutional failure, universities depend on peer review to certify scientific credibility, yet frequently neglect to teach researchers how to perform it. The article advocates making peer review a core research skill through supervised discussions of preprints, confronting an academic culture that systematically trains researchers to pursue publication while neglecting to prepare them for the scrutiny that gives publication its credibility. Universities cannot credibly claim to cultivate independent scientific minds while leaving the disciplined exercise of scientific judgement to chance and informal apprenticeship.
My experience reviewing manuscripts and making editorial decisions has repeatedly exposed the complacent assumption that an extensive publication record qualifies someone to judge the work of others. Publishing prolifically offers no immunity against superficial reading, methodological ignorance or the temptation to turn peer review into an instrument of academic gatekeeping. Rigorous assessment requires distinguishing a fatal methodological flaw from a correctable limitation, a necessary revision from an unreasonable demand, and an original contribution from familiar ideas repackaged in fashionable terminology. It demands the courage to scrutinise prestigious authors as critically as unknown researchers and the intellectual honesty to acknowledge evidence that challenges one’s own publications. Doctoral programmes should explicitly cultivate these abilities, because scientific independence means little if researchers learn to question evidence only when doing so carries no professional risk.
Yet training more reviewers while continuing to disregard their contribution in career assessments would merely replenish the unpaid workforce of a system that treats scientific judgement as an inexhaustible resource and professional recognition as somebody else’s responsibility. The scale of this imbalance was documented by Hanson et al. (2024): annual indexed article output rose from approximately 1.92 million in 2016 to 2.82 million in 2022, a 47% increase in six years, outpacing growth in the research workforce and intensifying the demands of writing, reviewing and editing. The human consequences were illustrated in my earlier post, “The serious case of papers that remained unassigned to editors for more than a year”, which discussed a manuscript that spent 380 days awaiting an editor before peer review had even begun.
Such cases expose the human cost of editorial paralysis and sharpen the question of why institutions encourage ever more submissions while offering so little professional recognition to those responsible for assessing them. Universities and funding agencies cannot absolve themselves by blaming reviewer shortages while maintaining assessment criteria that help manufacture those shortages. They must explain why producing a paper counts towards career advancement, whereas undertaking the intellectual work required to determine whether it deserves publication so often merits little beyond a thank-you email, a remarkably cheap substitute for recognition from institutions whose claims to scientific quality depend on the very labour they decline to reward while congratulating themselves on excellence.
