alt Hacker News> The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document.
I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no?
> They are also assuming good faith.
I can only relate this to code review, but assuming good faith means you assume they didn't try to introduce a bug by adding this dependency. But I would should still check to make sure this new dep isn't some typosquatted package. That's the rigor I'm responsible for.
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This is true, but here the equivalent situation is someone using a greek question mark (";") instead of a semicolon (";"), and you as a code reviewer are only expected to review the code visually and are not provided the resources required to compile the code on your local machine to see the compiler fail.
Yes in theory you can go through every semicolon to check if it's not actually a greek question mark; but one assumes good faith and baseline competence such that you as the reviewer would generally not be expected to perform such pedantic checks.
So if you think you might have reasonably missed greek question marks in a visual code review, then hopefully you can also appreciate how a paper reviewer might miss a false citation.
That is not, cannot be, and shouldn't be, the bar for peer review. There are two major differences between it and code review:
1. A patch is self-contained and applies to a codebase you have just as much access to as the author. A paper, on the other hand, is just the tip of the iceberg of research work, especially if there is some experiment or data collection involved. The reviewer does not have access to, say, videos of how the data was collected (and even if they did, they don't have the time to review all of that material).
2. The software is also self-contained. That's "prodcution". But a scientific paper does not necessarily aim to represent scientific consensus, but a finding by a particular team of researchers. If a paper's conclusions are wrong, it's expected that it will be refuted by another paper.
For ICLR reviewers were asked to review 5 papers in two weeks. Unpaid voluntary work in addition to their normal teaching, supervision, meetings, and other research duties. It's just not possible to understand and thoroughly review each paper even for topic experts. If you want to compare peer review to coding, it's more like "no syntax errors, code still compiles" rather than pr review.
A reviewer is assessing the relevance and "impact" of a paper rather than correctness itself directly. Reviewers may not even have access to the data itself that authors may have used. The way it essentially works is an editor asks the reviewers "is this paper worthy to be published in my journal?" and the reviewers basically have to answer that question. The process is actually the editor/journal's responsibility.
> I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no?
No.
Modern peer review is “how can I do minimum possible work so I can write ‘ICLR Reviewer 2025’ on my personal website”
> I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no?
Ph.D. in neuroscience here. Programmer by trade. This is not true. Less you know about most peer revies is better.
The better peer reviews are also not this 'thorough' and no one expects reviewers to read or even check references. Unless they are citing something they are familiar with and you are using it wrong then they will likely complain. Or they find some unknown citations very relevant to their work, they will read.
I don't have a great analogy to draw here. peer review is usually a thankless and unpaid work so there is unlikely to be any motivation for fraud detection unless it somehow affects your work.