Discussion Forums as Vehicles for Peer Review

[Guest guest]

As many of you are aware, the vast majority of articles published on

in the U.S. are not peer reviewed in any real sense

of the word. Many are self-published on the Web (guilty as charged) or

published at the sole discretion of the owner or editor of the

publication. Today, while doing research for a writing course I am

working, I stumbled across this article, which propose a model for

using discussion forums such as this one as a vehicle for peer review.

It would, of course, not be the gold standard of anonymous peer review

by hand-picked experts. However, I think evidence is mounting that

this is an arena where the wisdom of crowds is a valid tool in

assessing the quality of information (wikipedia and amazon.com reviews

come to mind). Check out this article:

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~lsherry/pubs/intercom.html and consider

sharing your work for constructive critique within this forum before

publishing it for general consumption.