Does Peer Review Work?

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"We'd like to know if the papers that we're reading are true or not. The system obviously doesn't do that," he says. "A lot of those papers will never be cited by anybody, and so that's a lot of time spent on a paper that didn't even matter in the first place"

Psychologist Adam Mastroianni says peer review has failed. Papers with major errors make it through the process. The ones without errors often fail to replicate. One approach to improve the process is better incentives. But Mastroianni argues that peer review isn't fixable. It's a failed experiment. Listen as he makes the case to EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a new approach to science and academic research.