Can Merton's Norms Still Help Us Find Truth? Peer Review in the 21st Century

• In Event: 15.059 - Fairmont Royal York Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.059-9 - Philosophical and Methodological Explorations of Complex Phenomena

Abstract

Sociologist Robert K. Merton published his influential 1942 paper at a time when trust in science was eroding. He described four standards for recognizing truth in scientific enterprise: communism, universalism, disinterestedness,and organised scepticism. Given the social and technological changes of the past eight decades and resurgent distrust of science, it is timely to question the current pertinence of Merton’s standards, as they are enacted in the process of scholarly peer review. In this paper, I present results of semi-structured interviews with Canadian scholars of education about their goals, experiences and challenges as scholarly peer reviewers. Results of the study largely confirm the continuing importance of Merton’s principles, but also reveal some vulnerabilities in the peer review system.

Author

• Susan Elgie, Independent Researcher