A funny story from academia is about the cohort of peer reviewers whose primary standard for acceptance is that their own work is cited in the bibliography of the submitted paper.
Peer review often fails to catch cheaters, too, as the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön case demonstrated (from 2000-2001 the Bell Labs researcher published 9 papers in Science and 7 in Nature, all of which made it through peer review, all of which were later retracted on grounds of fraudulent data manipulation). In the long run, the scandal did improve the field, as all publications on microelectronic graphite etc. devices now require electron microscopy proof that the claimed devices actually exist. Note current AI technology allows for data fraud and image manipulation that's much harder to detect than in the past, though.
> A funny story from academia is about the cohort of peer reviewers whose primary standard for acceptance is that their own work is cited in the bibliography of the submitted paper.
In some circles, the two first pieces of feedback on a paper draft, from a nominal co-author:
1. Cite [my people's various loosely related work].
2. Cite [particular researcher in this niche], who'll probably be a reviewer.
In a lot of fields, more eyes aren't going to create fewer walls, because (a) the important venues are selecting K winners out of N submissions, and that K is the bottleneck, and (b) in most fields, any real (and some unreal) results will get published somewhere.
Peer review often fails to catch cheaters, too, as the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön case demonstrated (from 2000-2001 the Bell Labs researcher published 9 papers in Science and 7 in Nature, all of which made it through peer review, all of which were later retracted on grounds of fraudulent data manipulation). In the long run, the scandal did improve the field, as all publications on microelectronic graphite etc. devices now require electron microscopy proof that the claimed devices actually exist. Note current AI technology allows for data fraud and image manipulation that's much harder to detect than in the past, though.