The interesting thing about peer review is not the peer reviewed piece itself but how many times that piece is cited by other scientists in their work; indeed not just how many times (if at all) but by who.
The charge against science here is serious and makes you wonder just how our knowledge and abilities have progressed if such things are true.
Well as usual the reality is not quite what is being portrayed in these headline-seeking articles.
Going back to what I initially stated, it is not what the peer reviewed article is, rather it is all about how it affects the scientific community as a whole. When a research paper is released the idea is to publish the findings of experiments and research so all of that teams peers around the world may benefit from the addition of knowledge in whatever field(s) the research has been undertaken. Good and helpful papers will then be cited as reference points in further experimentation which may further bolster the claims of the original paper (or debunk them) and so on and so forth.
After a while you will see certain papers being cited by other groups numerous times, particularly those papers at the boundaries of current understandings or those that are particularly useful for numerous avenues of research.
This is what science is all about after all; the passing on of knowledge
Contrast that with the types of peer reviewed articles that are only published to give support for a politicians angle or for a corporate need. You will rarely see them being cited at all. And why would that be? Because they exist solely to support that immediate goal and have no value as science in and of itself.
Scientists know this; Politicians know this; CEOs know this; The layman generally does not...
This is another reason not to allow yourself to remain scientifically illiterate.
