All the papers were reviewed by panelists from a panel of international experts using a double-blind review methodology.

“Figure 2, which is supposed to give an overview of the AAF algorithm is simply a random image that we downloaded off of Google’s image search using the search string “how to use Facebook”. By now you must be clearly wondering what AAF stands for and how does it work. The full form of AAF is ask a friend, and we do that by posting a status update on Facebook. When someone replies with an answer we simply note that down. If more than one person gives an answer, we take an average.”

8 Replies to “All the papers were reviewed by panelists from a panel of international experts using a double-blind review methodology.”

Completely acceptable as long as you correctly define “all”, “paper”, “review”, “panelist”, “panel”, “international”, “expert”, “double-blind” and “methodology”. And “the”.

That piece of research tells me everything one needs to know about Indian “peer review”. One of the countries I tend to ignore when it comes to medical research papers is India as, until I saw this brilliant paper, I found the research described in the papers to be rather bad. One of the most hilarious cases was an author who had over 100 papers looking at effects of digoxin on just about everything — needless to say the contribution of this author to the human fund of knowledge is negative.
The situation isn’t much better in N. America where one has the “publish or perish” scenario that young researchers who have not yet obtained tenure are required to abide by. At some point university administrators came to the dubious conclusion that an academics worth was a linear function of the number of papers he had published. It’s analogous to defining the worth of a gold-panner by the number of tons of silt he’d panned and thus the individual who only had to pan a few times to acquire a 1 lb gold nugget is inferior to the gold panner who had plowed through tons of silt but had only a few grains of gold dust to show for it. In the current climate, Einstein wouldn’t make it as an academic as he had only a mere two papers in physics and, besides, everyone now would know that his qualifications to be a physicist were non-existent.
The solution to this problem appears to be the scientific blog. Crowd sourced research has thousands of peer reviewers and is subject to far closer scrutiny than the average academic paper. One just has to look at the voluminous comments on any article posted on Watts Up With That to see that no error will slip by the readership. Academic research has painted itself into a corner and now justifies its existence via a circular argument which is: our research is important because we are highly qualified professors. The “qualifications” of these professors arise from their belonging to a “respected” institution which, given the amount of junk science which has been shown to exist recently, is rapidly losing respect among those who still believe in free inquiry and objectivity in science. Given the education bubble that is currently taking place, it won’t be long before it bursts and the academics who got ahead by parroting lines from their thesis supervisor will be driving cabs which is probably at the limits of their intellectual competency. Those individuals who are truly innovative and skilled at research will find jobs elsewhere.
One definition I heard of science was that it was a means of having an average, not too bright, researcher produce worthwhile results. That may have been true in the early 1900’s when it took huge teams of scientists, including many which were none too bright, to perform millions of mundane measurements of physical and chemical phenomena. Now, that science has become politicized, we’re in a situation where only findings that are consistent with statist dogma are allowed to be published. The last time this happened in a big way was when German universities decreed that no Jewish scientist was capable of producing any worthwhile work and hence the Manhattan project took place in the US rather than in Germany. This denigrated “Jewish science” turned out to be of far greater importance than that ascribed to it by the guardians of political correctness at German universities during the 1930’s. The USSR had Lysenko and we’ve got CAGW demonstrating that statist science = garbage.