Peer-review is often touted as one the quintessential reasons for why scientific knowledge is more reliable than that obtained from other mediums: Experts in the field are required to go over submitted manuscripts and vet both the quality of the data and arguments being presented within. But how is peer review performed in practice? Essentially, as a member of a scientific field, you are expected to review manuscripts that are sent to you by editors of scientific publications, pro bono. All in all, I don't think that most scientists would argue that this is not a worthwhile endeavor for the greater good of the field.

This being said however, in some discussions I've had with fellow scientists, I think that many feel that there is a bit of a 'free ride' problem when it comes to peer-review. Though peer-review is designed to weed out those manuscripts whose work and interpretations do not fit the standards of legitimate science, one would expect that most manuscripts will be good enough shape by submission time that the task of the reviewer will involve judging only the content itself. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Various factors lead to incomplete manuscripts being submitted. A principle offender is likely the ability to list 'submitted' manuscripts as achievements in grant and scholarship applications. As the deadline for such applications loom, there's a strong pressure to get any 'nearly' complete manuscripts into the hands of a journal. Assuming that such manuscripts are not rejected outright, these greatly increase the amount of work for a reviewer, because in addition to evaluating the science itself, you may now be trying to parse poorly written sentences and incorrectly labeled figures.

Oddly perhaps, there are no 'classes' where you learn how to properly peer-review manuscripts. I suppose it's one of those things that you're supposed to learn from your various mentors - though in my experience, standards for acceptance/rejection vary widely between different people (which is not a bad thing if you value a diversity of opinions). However, I've never encountered a situation where someone thought it was okay to simply reject a manuscript outright because it was incomprehensible as written, thus requiring tedious reading of obscure references and external sources in order to understand what was being argued.

It is my impression that the number of papers being published is out pacing the number of new Ph.D.s actively working in academic scientific disciplines. Thus the pool of reviewers per capita is shrinking. I worry that at some point either we're going to have to work hard to make sure that manuscripts are of excellent presentational quality prior to submission, or the hammer is going to have to fall and more papers are going to get rejected outright for even minor 'preparational' offenses. Scientists are generally busy enough already.