Academic peer review

Academic peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) academic field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is widely used to increase academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals. However, criticism of peer review include failure to prevent publication of invalid research or scientific fraud, low correlation with future impact, slowness, and lack of accountability.