As if peer reviewers weren’t overburdened enough, imagine if journals asked them to also independently replicate the experiments they were reviewing? True, replication is a big problem — and always has been. At the November 2016 SpotOn conference in London, UK historian Noah Moxham of the University of St Andrews in Scotland mentioned that, in the past, some peer reviewers did replicate experiments. We asked him to expand on the phenomenon here.
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Retraction Watch: During what periods in history did peer reviewers repeat experiments? And how common was the practice?
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Noah Moxham: Not tremendously! It was quite common at the Royal Academy of Sciences (after the 1789 Revolution, the Institut de France) in Paris from about the mid-eighteenth century. It was mostly used to evaluate the work of outsiders — meaning, non-Academy members. There were also exercises in systematic replication between the Royal Society of London and the Oxford Philosophical Society in the early 1680s, when magnetic experiments and chemical analysis of minerals would be carried out in one location and details of the experiment (together with the raw material, where necessary) were sent to be tried at the other. But it’s difficult to call that peer review because it wasn’t explicitly tied to any kind of publishing or gatekeeping protocol.
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Read the rest of this interview