Sciencesque has an anonymous update of the impact factor and peer review discussion
Journals with peer review perform a valuable service. Reviewing filters out the rubbish and provides useful comments to improve the good stuff before it is published. Yes, there is some good stuff that doesn’t see the light of day due to unfavourable reviews and yes, there is some poor work that is published anyway to to soft reviewers, but overall it works. And that means that as a scientist, I don’t have to sort through so much crap when I check the literature. I don’t have time to read everything, and I often only have time to read abstracts. I want to know that those abstracts reflect valid work that an editor and two or three reviewers have judged “goodâ€.
Does anybody believe that a reviewer with the same background, same age and same experience will produce so much less crap than his/her colleague? Maybe 4 eyes can see more than 2 but many papers included already 20 or 40 eyes.
Does anyone believe that any journal will guarantee “better” research than another? Some editors believe so. The reason, however, are not better reviews but authors sending more important outcomes to higher impact journals.
In any case, reading full papers remains important irrespective of journal impact. Careful reading can never be replaced by abstract browsing — there is also no way to “see Europe including pope in 3 days”, yea, yea.