Peer Review in Psychology: Process, Types and Evaluation

In 1982, two psychologists resubmitted 12 already-published papers to the journals that had printed them, under made-up names. Peer review spotted only three, and eight of the other nine were rejected.

Every study you learn about in psychology, from Milgram’s obedience experiments to the Strange Situation, reached you because it passed peer review. Before a finding is published in a journal, other experts check whether the method was sound, the statistics were right and the conclusions follow from the data. That process is what the AQA specification calls “the role of peer review in the scientific process”, and it sits in the research methods section alongside ethics, reliability and validity (AQA, 2015).

Peer review is also one of the best examples of psychology studying itself. Psychologists have run experiments on reviewers, sent them fake papers and planted deliberate errors to see who notices. The results are often uncomfortable, and they give you exactly the evidence you need to evaluate peer review in an exam answer rather than simply describe it.

This guide explains what peer review is, each step of the process, the different types, why it matters for science and for the economy, its strengths and its limitations, and how the replication crisis is changing it. It ends with a scenario quiz and a guide to answering exam questions, so you can check you can apply every point.

What Is Peer Review in Psychology?

Peer review in psychology is the assessment of a piece of research by other psychologists who are experts in the same area, before it is published in a journal or awarded funding. The reviewers judge whether the research is original, well designed, accurately analysed and honestly reported, and advise the journal editor on whether it deserves to be published.

Kelly, Sadeghieh and Adeli (2014) define peer review as subjecting an author’s scholarly work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. Its purpose is to stop unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations and personal opinions reaching print without expert checking first.

A simple way to think of peer review is as quality control for knowledge. A factory checks its products before they leave the building; science checks its findings before they enter the published record, where other researchers, teachers, journalists, doctors and policy makers will treat them as reliable.

Who Are the “Peers”?

The peers in peer review are other researchers working in the same specialist area as the author, usually academics at universities or research institutes. A study of children’s memory would be reviewed by developmental or cognitive psychologists, not by a social psychologist or a statistician from another discipline, because only a specialist knows the existing research well enough to judge whether the new work adds to it.

Reviewers are generally not paid for their review work (Huisman & Smits, 2017). They review because it is seen as part of being a researcher, because journals review their own work in return, and because reading new research early keeps them up to date. That voluntary, unpaid status matters when we come to evaluate peer review, because it helps explain why the process can be slow and why reviewers do not always check every detail.

What Each Exam Board Requires

All three major A level specifications name peer review, but they frame it slightly differently. AQA pairs it with the implications of psychological research for the economy, OCR links it to the integrity of the psychological community, and Edexcel places it with the conventions of published research reports.

Whichever board you sit, you need three things: a clear definition, a description of the process, and an evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses. AQA has asked for a short explanation of why research should be peer reviewed, which is covered in the exam section at the end of this guide (AQA, 2023).

The Peer Review Process: Step by Step

The peer review process has six main steps: the researcher submits a paper, the editor screens it, independent reviewers assess it, the editor makes a decision, the author revises it, and the accepted paper is published. Many papers go through the review and revision steps more than once before a final decision is reached.

1. Submission. The researcher writes up the study as a report, with an abstract, introduction, method, results and discussion, and submits it to a journal that publishes work in that area.
2. Editorial screening. The journal editor reads the paper and decides whether it fits the journal and meets a basic standard. Papers that do not are rejected straight away, which is called a desk rejection.
3. Review by experts. The editor sends the paper to independent reviewers, usually two or three specialists in the field. Each reads the paper closely and writes a report with a recommendation.
4. Editorial decision. The editor weighs the reports and decides to accept the paper, ask for minor or major revisions, or reject it.
5. Revision and resubmission. The author responds to each of the reviewers’ points, changes the paper and sends it back, often with a letter explaining every change. The revised paper may go back to the same reviewers.
6. Publication. Once accepted, the paper is edited, published and made available to other researchers, who can then scrutinise and try to replicate it.

Data from 3,500 authors’ experiences of journal review give a sense of how this works in practice. Across all fields, a paper received an average of about 2.2 referee reports, and psychology papers went through an average of 2.23 rounds of review before a final decision (Huisman & Smits, 2017). Rejection and resubmission to a second or third journal is common, so the whole journey from first submission to publication can take well over a year.

What Reviewers Look For

Reviewers look at whether the research is original, whether the method can test the hypothesis, whether the analysis is correct and whether the conclusions go beyond the data. In practice, that means asking a series of questions about each section of the report.

• Importance and originality: does the study add something new to what is already known, and does the introduction cover the relevant earlier research?
• Design: is the experimental design appropriate, were extraneous variables controlled, and is the sample large and representative enough?
• Validity and reliability: do the measures actually test what the hypothesis is about, and could the study be repeated?
• Analysis: is the right statistical test used, are the results reported fully, and has the author claimed significance correctly?
• Conclusions: do the conclusions follow from the results, or has the author overgeneralised?
• Ethics: was the research approved by an ethics committee and conducted in line with the relevant code of conduct?

The Four Possible Decisions

Peer review ends in one of four decisions. Outright acceptance on first submission is rare; most published papers pass through at least one round of revision.

Why Is Peer Review Important in the Scientific Process?

Peer review is important because it acts as a gatekeeper for scientific knowledge: it stops poor-quality, flawed or fraudulent research from being published and treated as fact, it improves the research that is published, and it helps decide which research gets funded. Psychology’s claim to be a science depends partly on this kind of independent checking.

The AQA mark scheme for the 2023 Paper 2 question on peer review credits two main reasons: reducing the chance that flawed or unscientific research is published, treated as fact and misinforms the public, and improving the quality of published reports by suggesting amendments or further work. It also accepts peer review’s role in allocating research funding (AQA, 2023). Those three purposes are the core of any answer.

1. Validating Research Before It Becomes “Fact”

Peer review validates the quality and relevance of research before it reaches the public. Once a finding is in a journal, it is cited in textbooks, reported in newspapers, used to design therapies and quoted in policy documents. A mistake that gets through is copied and repeated for years, so it is far better to catch it at the start.

This matters most for research with real-world consequences. Psychological findings shape how children are taught, how offenders are treated, how mental illness is diagnosed and how eyewitness evidence is handled in court. Research that informs those decisions needs to have been checked by someone other than the person who did it.

2. Improving the Quality of Research

Peer review improves research even when it does not reject it. Reviewers point out alternative explanations the author had not considered, ask for extra analyses, request clearer reporting of the procedure so others can replicate it, and challenge conclusions that go too far. A Cochrane review of the evidence found that editorial peer review appears to make papers more readable and improve the general quality of reporting, although the authors stressed that the evidence for this is limited (Jefferson et al., 2007).

3. Preventing Fraud and Plagiarism

Peer review is meant to act as a deterrent to fraud, plagiarism and the invention of data. Knowing that an expert will scrutinise the method and results should discourage researchers from cutting corners. As the limitations section shows, peer review is far better at deterring fraud than detecting it, but the principle that work must survive expert inspection is still a safeguard.

4. Supporting Psychology’s Status as a Science

Peer review is one of the features that makes psychology a science rather than a collection of opinions. Scientific knowledge is supposed to be public, checkable and self-correcting. Peer review is the first point at which a claim is exposed to criticism from people with no stake in it being true, and publication then allows anyone else to try to replicate or falsify it. A theory that is never scrutinised cannot be tested.

This is why statistical ideas such as statistical significance and effect sizes matter to reviewers: a large part of their job is checking whether the numbers support the claim. The same scrutiny applies to ethics; reviewers can and do question research that raises ethical issues or social sensitivity.

Types of Peer Review: Single-Blind, Double-Blind and Open

There are three main types of peer review: single-blind, where the reviewer knows who the author is but the author does not know the reviewer; double-blind, where neither knows the other’s identity; and open, where both identities are known. Kelly and colleagues (2014) describe these three as the ways in which peer review is generally conducted.

Single-Blind Review

Single-blind review is the traditional model, in which the reviewer stays anonymous but can see who wrote the paper. Anonymity is meant to let reviewers be frank. A junior researcher can tell a famous professor that their analysis is wrong without worrying about their career. The cost is that the reviewer’s judgement may be coloured by who the author is, whether that means trusting a big name too easily or dismissing an unknown one.

Double-Blind Review

Double-blind review removes the authors’ names and institutions from the paper, so that it is judged on its content alone. It is designed to reduce the biases described in the gender and cultural bias debate, such as favouring men, Western researchers or prestigious universities. In a small field, however, reviewers can often work out who wrote a paper from its topic, method or the work it cites.

Does blinding make reviews better? The best test is a randomised controlled trial at the BMJ, in which a paper was modified to contain eight weaknesses and sent to 420 reviewers under different conditions. Whether reviewers were blinded to the authors or asked to sign their reports made no difference to how many weaknesses they found. On average, reviewers commented on just two of the eight (Godlee, Gale & Martyn, 1998). Blinded reviewers were, however, less likely to recommend rejection, which hints that knowing the authors did affect their judgement.

Open Peer Review

Open peer review makes the process transparent: authors know who reviewed their work, and some journals publish the reviewers’ reports alongside the paper. Kelly and colleagues (2014) note that it discourages malicious comments, carelessness and delay, because reviewers’ names are attached to what they write. The worry is that openness may make reviewers softer, especially when the author is more senior than they are.

Post-Publication Peer Review

Post-publication peer review is the scrutiny a paper receives after it is published, through replication attempts, published comments and criticism, and online discussion. It is not a replacement for review before publication, but it has become increasingly important. Several of the cases later in this guide, including a fraud that fooled reviewers for years, were uncovered not by the original reviewers but by people examining the work after it appeared.

Peer Review Beyond Journals: Funding and the Economy

Peer review is not only used to decide what is published. It is also used to decide which research proposals receive public money and to judge the quality of research done in universities, which links it directly to the AQA topic of the implications of psychological research for the economy.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the main public funder of research in the UK, assesses applications using expert review and moderating panels. It appoints experts from the UK and overseas with recognised expertise in the relevant area to review applications against published criteria (UKRI, n.d.). This matters because funding is limited: peer review is how the research community tries to ensure that money goes to the studies most likely to produce valuable knowledge.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UK’s system for assessing the quality of research in universities, and expert panels judge the research each university submits. One of its stated purposes is to inform the allocation of block-grant research funding to universities based on research quality (REF, n.d.), so peer judgement shapes where research money flows across the whole country.

The economic link runs both ways. Peer review helps make sure that research used to inform expensive decisions, such as treatments for depression or interventions in schools, is sound before public money is spent on applying it. Research that is flawed but published can waste money for years, both on applying the finding and on other researchers trying to build on it.

A Short History of Peer Review

Peer review is much younger than most people assume. Scientific journals began in the 1660s, but external review of every paper was not always expected, and some of the most famous journals did not require it until the 1970s.

• 1665: Henry Oldenburg founded Philosophical Transactions, the journal later taken over by the Royal Society of London (Fyfe, 2015).
• 1731: The Royal Society of Edinburgh described sending papers to the members most versed in the subject, whose identity was not made known to the author (Kelly et al., 2014).
• 1752: The Royal Society took formal control of Philosophical Transactions and created a standing Committee of Papers to decide collectively which papers to publish (Fyfe, 2015).
• 1936: Albert Einstein withdrew a paper from Physical Review after it was sent to an anonymous referee, complaining that he had not authorised the editor to show it to specialists. The referee’s criticisms turned out to be right, and Einstein changed his conclusions before publishing elsewhere (Kennefick, 2005).
• 1973: Nature made external peer review a requirement for publication, after decades in which its editors often printed papers they trusted without sending them out (Baldwin, 2015).

The Einstein episode is a useful story for an exam answer. It shows peer review working exactly as intended: an anonymous expert spotted an error in the work of the most famous scientist in the world, and the published version was better for it. Kennefick (2005) suggests it may have been Einstein’s only real encounter with anonymous peer review.

Strengths of Peer Review

The main strengths of peer review are that it filters out much poor research, improves the papers that are published, gives the public and policy makers a signal of which findings to trust, and helps allocate limited research funds fairly. No alternative that has been tried does all of these things better.

• It protects the credibility of psychology. Readers can place more trust in a peer-reviewed journal article than in a blog post, a press release or a company’s marketing claim, because at least two independent experts have checked it.
• It improves research. Reviewers catch errors, suggest better analyses and force authors to report their methods fully enough to be replicated. The Einstein case shows that even brilliant researchers benefit.
• It deters fraud and carelessness. Researchers who know their work will be scrutinised have a reason to be careful and honest, even if review does not always catch those who are not.
• It spreads expertise. Editors can draw on specialists all over the world, so a paper is judged by the people best placed to evaluate it rather than by a single editor.
• It supports fair funding decisions. Expert review of grant applications is a way of deciding which projects deserve public money on merit rather than on connections.

A fair evaluation also recognises that many criticisms of peer review are criticisms of how it is done, not of the idea itself. As the authors of the Cochrane review put it, the absence of evidence that peer review works is not the same as evidence that it does not work; it is simply very hard to study (Jefferson et al., 2007).

Limitations of Peer Review

The main limitations of peer review are that reviewers miss many errors and rarely detect fraud, that the process is biased towards positive results and towards findings that match reviewers’ own views, that it can favour famous authors and institutions, that reviewers may have conflicts of interest, and that it is slow. Each of these has been tested directly by psychologists and other researchers.

Richard Smith, a former editor of the BMJ, summed up the problem in the title of a well-known paper: peer review is “a flawed process at the heart of science and journals” (Smith, 2006). His article, which is free to read on PubMed Central, is a clear introduction to the evidence below.

Reviewers Miss Most Errors

Peer reviewers miss most of the errors in a paper, even when those errors are serious. In the Godlee trial, reviewers found on average two of eight deliberately inserted weaknesses (Godlee et al., 1998). A later BMJ study sent 607 reviewers three papers, each containing nine major and five minor methodological errors. At the start, reviewers found an average of 2.58 of the nine major errors, and short training packages barely improved this (Schroter et al., 2008).

The authors’ conclusion was blunt: editors should not assume that reviewers will detect most major errors. This does not mean reviewers are lazy. They are unpaid, reviewing alongside their own research and teaching, and they usually cannot see the raw data. They are judging a written account of a study, not the study itself.

Fraud Can Slip Through for Years

Peer review is poor at detecting fraud, because reviewers assume the data they are shown are real. The clearest case in psychology is the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. An investigation by three university committees established fraud in 55 of his publications, many in leading international journals (Levelt, Noort & Drenth Committees, 2012).

The committees were sharply critical of peer review. They noted that Stapel’s effects were improbably large and his hypotheses almost always confirmed, and found it “almost inconceivable” that reviewers for leading journals had failed to notice impossible statistical results. The fraud was eventually exposed not by reviewers but by three young researchers in Stapel’s own department.

Medicine has an equally famous example. In 1998, The Lancet published a peer-reviewed paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues describing 12 children with bowel problems and developmental regression, in eight of whom parents linked the onset of symptoms to the MMR vaccine (Wakefield et al., 1998). The Lancet fully retracted it in 2010 (The Editors of The Lancet, 2010). A sample of 12 children should never have supported the weight the public placed on it, and the case is a reminder of why a single case series or case study cannot establish cause and effect.

Publication Bias and the File Drawer Problem

Publication bias is the tendency for journals to publish studies with positive, statistically significant results and to reject studies that find no effect. Robert Rosenthal (1979) called this the file drawer problem: for every published study showing an effect, there may be several unpublished studies finding nothing, sitting in researchers’ filing cabinets. The published literature then makes effects look larger and more consistent than they are.

The scale of the problem is striking. When Scheel, Schijen and Lakens (2021) analysed a random sample of hypothesis-testing papers from the standard psychology literature, 96% reported a positive result for their first hypothesis. It is very unlikely that 96% of the hypotheses psychologists test are correct. The authors suggest that a plausible explanation is publication bias, together with analysis practices that inflate false positives.

Reviewers Favour Results That Fit Their Views

Reviewers are influenced by whether results agree with their own theoretical beliefs, an example of confirmation bias. Michael Mahoney (1977) tested this by sending 75 reviewers for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, a journal committed to behaviourist psychology, a manuscript about the effects of rewards on motivation. Every version described identical experimental procedures; what differed was the results.

When the results supported the behaviourist position, reviewers usually recommended accepting the paper with moderate revisions. When the identical study produced negative results, the average reviewer recommended rejection or major revision (Mahoney, 1977). The same method was rated as better or worse depending on what it found, which is exactly what peer review is supposed to prevent.

Bias Towards Famous Names and Institutions

Peer review can favour work from prestigious authors and universities. Peters and Ceci (1982) took 12 articles already published in highly regarded American psychology journals, each written by researchers from prestigious departments. They replaced the authors’ names and institutions with fictitious ones, such as the “Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential”, and resubmitted each paper to the journal that had published it 18 to 32 months earlier.

Only three of the 38 editors and reviewers (8%) recognised the resubmissions. Of the nine papers that went through review, eight were rejected, with 16 of 18 referees recommending against publication, often citing “serious methodological flaws” (Peters & Ceci, 1982). Work judged good enough to publish under a famous name was judged flawed under an unknown one. The study provoked a long published debate, but it raised hard questions about both the reliability of reviewers’ judgements and the influence of status.

Conflicts of Interest and Rival Researchers

Reviewers are chosen because they work in the same area as the author, which means they may also be rivals, or may have a personal stake in the outcome. A reviewer could delay or reject a competitor’s paper, or be reluctant to approve work that undermines their own. Anonymity makes this hard to detect.

A real psychology example involves replication. In 2011, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published nine experiments by Daryl Bem, involving more than 1,000 participants, which appeared to show that people could sense future events (Bem, 2011). Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Chris French ran three careful replications of one experiment, and all three failed (Ritchie, Wiseman & French, 2012).

Getting those failures published proved harder than running them. French (2012) described how the original journal rejected the paper without review because it “does not publish replications”, and two more journals did the same. When a fourth journal finally sent it for review, one of the two referees had reservations and the paper was rejected. That referee, the authors suspected and Bem later confirmed, was Bem himself. The paper was eventually published in PLoS ONE.

Peer Review Is Slow

Peer review is slow, which delays useful findings reaching the people who need them. In data from 3,500 authors, the first response from a journal took 13 weeks on average across all fields, and 14 weeks in psychology (Huisman & Smits, 2017). Psychology authors then took an average of 50 days to revise, and papers often go through two rounds or more. Rejection and resubmission elsewhere starts the clock again.

Predatory Journals and Weak Review

Not every journal that claims to be peer reviewed actually reviews carefully. In 2013, the science journalist John Bohannon wrote a spoof research paper with flaws so obvious that any competent reviewer should have rejected it, and submitted versions to 304 open-access journals that charged authors a fee. By the time he stopped, 157 had accepted it (Bohannon, 2013). The phrase “peer reviewed” is only as good as the journal using it.

Peer Review and the Replication Crisis

The replication crisis is the discovery, during the 2010s, that many published psychology findings could not be reproduced when other researchers repeated the studies. It is closely linked to peer review, because it showed that passing review is no guarantee that a finding is real.

The Open Science Collaboration (2015) repeated 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals. Ninety-seven percent of the original studies had reported statistically significant results, but only 36% of the replications did. All 100 originals had passed peer review. The problem was not that reviewers were careless, but that the system rewarded new, positive and surprising results, and rarely published the replications that would have exposed the weak ones.

This connects peer review to the ideas of validity and reliability. A finding that cannot be replicated lacks reliability, and one that only appears under the exact conditions of the original study may lack external validity. Peer review judges a single study on paper; replication tests whether the finding holds up in the world.

How Psychology Is Improving Peer Review

Psychology has responded to the weaknesses of peer review with reforms designed to judge research on its method rather than its results. The most important are Registered Reports, pre-registration, open data and open peer review.

Registered Reports

A Registered Report is a type of journal article in which peer review happens before the data are collected. The researcher submits the introduction, hypotheses and planned method. Reviewers judge whether the question is worth asking and the method can answer it, and if they approve, the journal commits to publishing the study whatever it finds. The format was launched at the neuroscience journal Cortex in 2013 (Chambers, 2013) and has since been adopted by many psychology journals.

Registered Reports appear to work. Scheel and colleagues (2021) compared 71 published Registered Reports with 152 standard psychology papers. While 96% of the standard papers reported a positive result for their first hypothesis, only 44% of the Registered Reports did. The most plausible explanation is that Registered Reports reduce publication bias, because the decision to publish is made before anyone knows the result. The Center for Open Science keeps an up-to-date guide to Registered Reports and the journals that offer them.

Pre-Registration, Open Data and Open Review

• Pre-registration: researchers publish their hypotheses and analysis plan online before collecting data, so reviewers can check whether the reported analysis matches the plan. Ritchie and colleagues pre-registered their replications of Bem.
• Open data: many journals now ask authors to share their raw data, so reviewers and readers can check the numbers and look for the kind of impossible results that went unnoticed in the Stapel case.
• Open peer review: publishing reviewers' reports alongside papers makes the process accountable and lets readers see what was checked.
• Replication-friendly journals: some journals now explicitly welcome replications, including failed ones, so the scientific record can correct itself.

These reforms will not make peer review perfect, but they target its specific weaknesses. Publication bias is tackled by deciding before the results are known, confirmation bias by judging the method not the outcome, and fraud by making data available to anyone who wants to check.

How to Answer Peer Review Exam Questions

Peer review questions usually ask you to explain its purpose, describe the process or evaluate it. Short questions reward a precise, well-elaborated point; longer ones reward balanced evaluation supported by evidence.

AQA's June 2023 Paper 2 asked: "Briefly explain one reason why research should be peer reviewed" for 2 marks. The mark scheme gives 2 marks for a clear reason with appropriate elaboration and 1 mark for a limited or muddled one (AQA, 2023). A full-mark answer might read:

Peer review reduces the chance that flawed research is published. Independent experts check the method and analysis before publication, so poorly controlled or unscientific studies are rejected rather than being treated as fact and misinforming the public.

Notice the structure: a reason (reduces flawed research), then the elaboration that earns the second mark (experts check before publication, so it is not treated as fact). The same pattern works for the other creditworthy reasons: improving the quality of research through suggested changes, and allocating research funding fairly.

Writing an Evaluation of Peer Review

For a longer evaluation question, aim for a clear point, evidence and a link back to the question for each strength and limitation. A strong plan might cover:

1. A brief description of the process: submission, review by two or three anonymous experts, decision, revision.
2. A strength: it improves research and protects credibility, supported by the Einstein example or the Cochrane finding on readability.
3. A limitation: reviewers miss errors, supported by Godlee et al. (1998) or Schroter et al. (2008).
4. A limitation: publication bias and the file drawer problem, supported by the 96% positive-results figure.
5. A limitation: reviewer bias, supported by Mahoney (1977) or Peters and Ceci (1982).
6. A counterpoint: reforms such as Registered Reports address these weaknesses, with 44% positive results showing reduced bias.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Confusing peer review with replication. Peer review is checking a report before publication; replication is repeating the study. They are related but different.
• Saying reviewers repeat the study. Reviewers read and assess the written report. They do not rerun the research and usually do not see the raw data.
• Saying peer review guarantees a finding is true. It reduces the chance of errors; it does not eliminate them, as the replication crisis shows.
• Listing limitations without evidence. "Reviewers may be biased" earns little on its own. Name the study that shows it.
• Ignoring the economy link on AQA. If a question asks about the implications for the economy, mention funding decisions and the cost of acting on flawed research.

Conclusion

Peer review is the process by which independent experts check research before it is published or funded. It aims to filter out flawed and fraudulent work, improve the research that is published and give everyone else a reason to trust what appears in journals. It is a central part of what makes psychology a science.

Psychologists have also shown that peer review is far from perfect. Reviewers miss most deliberate errors, favour positive results and findings that fit their own views, can be swayed by famous names, and rarely catch fraud. The replication crisis made those weaknesses impossible to ignore, and reforms such as Registered Reports, pre-registration and open data are the field's response. For an exam, the key is balance: peer review is flawed, but it is still better than no checking at all, and it is improving.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is peer review in psychology in simple terms?

In simple terms, peer review means other experts checking a psychologist's research before it is published. They look for mistakes, weak methods and conclusions that go too far, then tell the journal whether to publish it, ask for changes or turn it down. It works like quality control for scientific knowledge.

Why is peer review important in psychology?

It matters because psychological findings shape therapy, education, policing and public policy. Checking by independent experts reduces the chance that flawed or fraudulent studies are published and treated as fact, improves the studies that are published, and helps decide which research receives limited public funding.

What are the steps of the peer review process?

1. The author submits a written report to a journal.
2. The editor screens it and may reject it immediately.
3. Two or three independent experts review it.
4. The editor accepts, requests revisions or rejects.
5. The author revises and resubmits.
6. The accepted paper is published.

What are the three types of peer review?

The three types are single-blind, double-blind and open review. In single-blind review the reviewer knows the author but stays anonymous. In double-blind review neither side knows the other. In open review both identities are known, and the reports are sometimes published with the paper.

Is peer review anonymous?

Usually, yes. In most psychology journals reviewers are anonymous to the author, and in double-blind journals the author's name is hidden from the reviewers too. Open peer review is the exception: names are shared, which makes reviewers more accountable but may make junior researchers reluctant to criticise senior ones.

Is peer review reliable?

Only partly. Reviewers often disagree about the same paper, as Mahoney (1977) found, and experiments that planted errors in manuscripts found reviewers spotted only two or three of eight or nine. Peer review filters out much weak work, but it is a safeguard rather than a guarantee, which is why replication still matters.

How long does peer review take?

A first decision from a psychology journal takes around 14 weeks on average, based on reports from thousands of authors (Huisman & Smits, 2017). With revisions and further rounds of review, publication often takes many months, and longer still if the paper is rejected and sent to another journal.

Does peer review remove bias?

No. Peer review can reduce some biases, especially when it is double-blind, but it also introduces its own: reviewers tend to favour positive results, findings that match their own theories, and authors from well-known institutions. Registered Reports, where the decision to publish is made before results exist, are designed to reduce these biases.

Is peer review part of the scientific method?

Peer review is part of the scientific process rather than a step in an individual experiment. The scientific method covers forming and testing hypotheses; peer review is how the scientific community then checks that testing before accepting the results into shared knowledge. AQA calls it "the role of peer review in the scientific process" for this reason.

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• Rosenthal, R. (1979). The file drawer problem and tolerance for null results. Psychological Bulletin, 86(3), 638-641.
• Scheel, A. M., Schijen, M. R. M. J., & Lakens, D. (2021). An excess of positive results: Comparing the standard psychology literature with Registered Reports. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(2).
• Schroter, S., Black, N., Evans, S., Godlee, F., Osorio, L., & Smith, R. (2008). What errors do peer reviewers detect, and does training improve their ability to detect them? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 101(10), 507-514.
• Smith, R. (2006). Peer review: A flawed process at the heart of science and journals. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99(4), 178-182.
• The Editors of The Lancet. (2010). Retraction: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet, 375(9713), 445.
• UK Research and Innovation. (n.d.). How we make decisions. UKRI.
• Wakefield, A. J., Murch, S. H., Anthony, A., Linnell, J., Casson, D. M., Malik, M., Berelowitz, M., Dhillon, A. P., Thomson, M. A., Harvey, P., Valentine, A., Davies, S. E., & Walker-Smith, J. A. (1998). Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet, 351(9103), 637-641. (Retracted)

Further Reading and Research

Recommended Articles

• Cognitive Biases: The Complete Guide
• Sampling Methods in Psychology: Techniques and Examples
• Stanley Milgram's Shock Experiment: Authority and Obedience

Suggested Books

• Ritchie, S. (2020). Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science. Bodley Head.
  • A readable account of how peer review and publishing go wrong, by one of the psychologists who tried to replicate Bem, covering fraud, publication bias and the replication crisis.
• Chambers, C. (2017). The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice. Princeton University Press.
  • Written by the creator of Registered Reports, it explains publication bias, hidden flexibility in analysis and the reforms designed to fix them.
• Coolican, H. (2019). Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology (7th ed.). Routledge.
  • The standard research methods textbook for A level and undergraduate psychology, placing peer review within the wider scientific process.

Recommended Websites

• AQA A-level Psychology (7182)
  • The official specification, past papers and mark schemes, including the June 2023 Paper 2 question on why research should be peer reviewed.
• Retraction Watch
  • A long-running site that reports on retracted papers across science, showing post-publication peer review in action, with a searchable database of retractions.
• Center for Open Science
  • The organisation behind the reproducibility project, with guides to Registered Reports, pre-registration and open data.

Kathy Brodie

Kathy Brodie is an Early Years Professional, Trainer and Author of multiple books on Early Years Education and Child Development. She is the founder of Early Years TV and the Early Years Summit.

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To cite this article please use:

Early Years TV Peer Review in Psychology: Process, Types and Evaluation. Available at: https://www.earlyyears.tv/peer-review-psychology-process-types-evaluation/ (Accessed: 2 October 2026).