If science was conducted solely by counting of peer reviewed articles, that seem to agree to a layman, we would be lost and have no science, at all.
Peer review is the very beginning and even that doesn't work any more. Too much literature. Too much corralling of thought under Govt grants or not. Too much money at stake. The flim/flam never stops. We are flim/flam monkeys with money.
Science + Politics = Power. It doesn't have to be good science. And it does not have to be in good journals, that the "peer review" was published. You make a silly journal and you call it, Environmental Systems or something..as if. Your job is to publish agenda junk. Why? To get agenda junk ADVERTIZING.
So, in science, we go by repeatable experiments, only. There have been so many failures of peer review, it is not even funny.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science
Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (
an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply aren't enough competent people to do the job.
--------------
http://publishing.mathforge.org/discussion/80/
L. A. V. Carvalho, On some contradictory computations in multi-dimensional mathematics, Nonlinear Analysis 63 (2005), 725-734,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.na.2005.02.074. [See
http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0603599 for severe criticism, but the paper has not been retracted.]
“Rohollah Mosallahnezhad”, Cooperative, compact algorithms for randomized algorithms, accepted by Applied Mathematics and Computation in 2007 and formatted/copy-edited but withdrawn after publicity,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amc.2007.03.011 and
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/sharif_paper.pdf. [In this unbelievable case, computer-generated nonsense was accepted for publication. See
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/blog/index.php?entry=entry070626-110103.]
M. Sivasubramanian, New parallel theory, Applied Mathematics Letters 23 (2010), 1137-1139,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aml.2010.05.003. [See
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/faked-data-unsubstantiated-claims-and-spirituality-add-up-to-a-math-journal-retraction/.]
M. Sivasubramanian and S. Kalimuthu, A computer application in mathematics, Computers & Mathematics with Applications 59 (2010), 296-297,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.camwa.2009.07.048 and
http://www.math.hkbu.edu.hk/~ttang/newspaper/funnyarticle11.pdf. [This paper supposedly proved the parallel postulate using “computer magnification”.]
These aren’t poor judgement calls or mathematical mistakes that were uncovered too late in seemingly valuable articles. Each one is a case in which I find it difficult to believe any competent referee could possibly have recommended acceptance, even for a journal with the lowest possible standards.
-------------
There is a guy, Rossi, out there right now, pushing Cold Fusion. He has a secret sauce, I think is a micro-themite powder.
FAKE
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/07/23/defkalion-demonstrates-lenr-live-right-now/
Folks there have been over 450 peer reviews over the years on something called, polywater. Bad science is endless.