I’ve never submitted a formal academic article or paper so I’m a bit fuzzy on the notion of “peer review”. What does this actually mean? Is this “peer” a committee or an individual? If the paper is on a controversial issue, especially in the social sciences or history, how can you be sure you’ll get a fair hearing, and won’t get unfairly sandbagged by an academic or scientific rival? How can some extremely arcane subjects like some types of theoretical mathematics even be effectively peer reviewed if only a small handful of people other than the author barely understand it to begin with?
It depends on the publication, but the ‘peers’ are usually a selected number of individuals with expertise in the field. They aren’t a comittee insofar as the normal practice is that the reviewers are unaware of who the other reviewers are. Each reviewer gives her own assesment and recommendations and sends it back to the publishers with no contact with the others. In my experience 3 reviewers are common, but I have had experience with at least 6 on one paper. That was because the paper was a collaborative effort that straddled three distinct fields.
The journal, symposium organisers or whatever should have enough sense not to send a paper to a noted opponent.There are ways of challenging the reviews if you believe they are being unnecessarily harsh which will lead to an examination of any personal or professional animosity. That doesn’t mean that you won’t get sent to reviewers who oppose your views, but reviewers should be selected for their integrity as well as their expertise, so that’s not as big an issue as it might seem. In practice a reviewer might expect somewhat higher standards of papers whose conclusions they disapprove of but I have never heard of anyone actually being denied publication if the paper was clearly worthy.
In those cases that handful of people will be the reviewers. However in practice this would occur very, very rarely, probably less than once every decade
A reviewer only needs to be expert in the general field, not the specific subject, to be effective. In fact I suspect that the best reviewers are not expert in the specific subject since they are better able to judge how accessible to the paper is to the general readership. If the reviewer is an expert mathematician in the general field and can’t understand what has been submitted then it will be sent back with a recommendation of a re-write for clarity, because it’s a sure thing that the general readership of the journal won’t be able to comprehend it if an expert reviewer can not.
In general the purpose of the review is to check for any glaring ommsions or methodological errors and to assess how novel and important the work is. It’s a process designed to ensure that the submission meets standards rather than to ensure that the authors didn’t deliberately lie or plagiarise. Because of that it’s not particularly important that the reviewer be expert enough to pick up deliberate fraud. Rather they need an ability to understand the general methodology and an ability to replicate what is submitted ith the data given even if they can’t reproduce the data themselves.
You can’t and it happens all the time. Like Blake said, a good journal editor or conference chief makes a big difference. But many journals are poorly run and referees can run pretty wild. They can figure out who you are and delay your paper, make spurious claims, get you to do many months’ work revising the paper for no real reason, extort citations for their own vaguely-related papers, demand rejoinders as a prerequesite for letting your stuff through etc.
Sometimes referees and editors make good suggestions. Mostly they make you really thorough. And eventually, most good papers get published.
I guess it all depends on the discipline. But I can address the last question, since I have worn all three hats, writer, referee, editor and I can tell you that on average only about half the papers get serious reviews. Let me start with the standard joke review, which, unfortunately, is only a slight exaggeration of actual reviews I have received wearing the first and third hat and (much as I hate to admit it) sent wearing the second. After the review has had the paper for 18 months and gotten several reminders from the editor, he finally responds with, “I recommend the paper for publication and there is a comma missing in the first paragraph of the introduction.”
The other side of the coin is a review I got within a month of submission that was a detailed 6 page critique, essentially completely correct. I and my coauthors were astonished.
Now let me speak as a referee. Even if you are an expert in the field, most mathematics papers are extremely hard to read. If you really need the results, you will work through it, but the job of a referee is anonymous, thankless, and all you ever get out of it are dunning notices from the editor and the feeling, FWIW, of having served the profession. I hate it and in recent years I have used age as an excuse for begging off. With a few exceptions.
I have resigned most of my editorial positions in the last five years, largely because I found dealing with referees so unpleasant. Knowing why didn’t help. I know of at least two cases in which the Annals of Math, one of the most pretigious (at least arguably the most prestigious) math journals around has essentially thrown up its hands and published a paper that they could not get evaluated. In both cases, it was the potential importance of the results that persuaded them. One of the two was eventually resolved by a different person using different methods (it resulted in a Fields medal) and the original paper has never been validated. The other one was accompanied by considerable computation and the referees (there were several) threw up their hands at judging them. I guess I would say that I accept the results, but with some misgivings.
I can respond as a former member of academia (former Ph.D. student) in a small but informed way. All disciplines have journals that are ranked by prestige in at least an informal way. There are also general purpose journals like Science and Nature that signal that you have found something that everyone better pay attention to. Those are highly prestigious and extremely competitive in a world-wide way. Acceptance rates for journals vary widely. For most disciplines, the final acceptance rate for their top journals is less than 30% and that is after the submitter has been bold enough to self-select themselves for submission to that journal. Virtually all articles get sent back for major or minor revision and that process can take many months to years. OTOH, most disciplines have lesser journals like “letters” journals that have little prestige and serve mostly to give less accomplished members of the academic community somewhere to publish. Virtually all college professors are required to publish so publications tend to stratify among the type of accomplishments of individual members.
In my field, it was considered standard practice to suggest reviewers and suggest people who shouldn’t be reviewers. It was impossible to tell if this actually happened, since the process is blinded, but we knew people who were bitter old men who would unfavorably review Luria and Delbruck, so at least we had to give it a shot.
Since the review process can be so lengthy and the turn-around after getting a paper rejected and resubmitted is often months, many journals have a pre-submission process which is a mini-review process by the editor or one reviewer who will give you an idea if it will fly in review. We submitted a paper in March, and it is still in review (it has basically been accepted, pending some issues by the third reviewer that we are addressing).