Research Highlights: A study of over 20,000 adults found that those who followed an 8-hour time-restricted eating schedule, a type of intermittent fasting, had a 91% higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease. People with heart disease or cancer ...
Peer review is unfortunately not a magic bullet. And conference abstracts do get a form of peer review because that’s how they get accepted for the conference.
The actual problem is that academics can pad their CVs doing terrible research and publishing it with alarmist headlines.
When they’ve written it up, it will get through peer review, somewhere, somehow, because peer review does not work. The fight will happen in the letters pages (if anyone has the energy) and won’t change a damn thing anyway.
Presentations don’t get peer review, at least not in biology (my field). I agree that peer review is totally broken though.
I didn’t say they did. But authors don’t just get to submit an abstract and have it accepted, it has been selected by whatever committee process was set up to sift the submissions. Many conferences will do a better job than the journals but mileage varies all over the fucking shop.
But my main bugbear here is the idea that peer review means anything. The dross that gets published is beyond depressing. But it’s probably worth noting that dross is much less likely to get submitted to a conference because a) fuck all CV points for an abstract and b) getting accepted means registering for the conference and turning up to get your peer review in person. Scammers don’t do that. Although there have been entire scam conferences so … heuristics don’t work any which way, really.
I’ve been to 30 or so national or international conferences in biology, and have never had an abstract rejected. I don’t think I’m doing anything special, so I assume pretty much everyone gets in. More presenters = more money. I’ve also been on the selection committee side and it is definitely not more selective than peer review. We’re only reviewing an abstract, usually under 100 words. Prob varies by field though. Maybe medical conferences are selective?
You can’t generalise about conferences any more than you can generalise about individual journals, or publishers, or peer review.
Lack of peer review is not a standalone criticism. The problems with this study are obvious and you do not need to rely on an imaginary peer reviewer to point them out.