Peer reviewing

Peer Reviewing is the process by which the academic community judges that a new piece of research or knowledge is acceptable, at least until further developments. A group of academically respectable people (peers) looks at a new article submitted to the editor of an academic journal, reads it and reviews it (judges whether it is suitable or not). This involves answering such questions as 'Is it original?', 'Is it a worthy contribution to knowledge in the subject?', 'Is the data adequate to support the conclusions?', 'Are the calculations correctly done?' and so on. (The details will vary greatly between subjects. Basically, the peer review will be saying to the editor 'This is worth publishing, and good enough not to lead to virulent criticism.' It may lead to healthy academic debate - any good academic article should be subject to discussion, refinement and development, but not to attacks on the grounds of bad research, plagiarism, stupidity etc.)