Peer Review in Psychological Injury and Law: Advancing Science
摘要
Peer review is the cornerstone of high-quality scholarly publication. This article describes the peer review process, generally, and how it works in Psychological Injury and Law, specifically. The peer review process is arguably imperfect, but science has self-corrective mechanisms related to it. Science is an ongoing project, and peer review both increases the quality of its publications while helping to point out limitations and future directions required in the research. Publications that refer to the need for further research do not diminish the cumulative quality of the research in a field, nor deny that it could be applied with care for acknowledged limitations. The peer review process can be improved, but it remains the bedrock of quality assurance in science. A criticism of peer review in the area of psychological injury and law is that peer reviewers have implicit biases for or against the validity of performance validity tests (PVTs) and symptom validity tests (SVTs). But the self-corrective scientific publishing process mitigates these concerns. Also, another related criticism of PVTs and SVTs is that their authors and peer reviewers are the ones who are called to court as expert witnesses about the tests, which queries their independent status. As with science itself, the court has self-corrective procedures that mitigate any such biases. The article is aimed at (a) further educating peer reviewers about these issues and the need to debias and (b) assuring the scientific community that science (and this journal) is aware of the biases and publishes articles, for example, on PVTs and SVTs, which meet the stringent standards of peer-reviewed science.