Peerless Review

Warren Throckmorton is the psychologist at Grove City College who makes a living telling people that gay people can become straight. He works with groups like the CRC and PFOX to promote anti-gay causes, goes around the country speaking, writes articles and maintains a web site. His contribution to the ugliness is worse than some, because he has a PhD and a professorship and he gives these hateful things an appearance of legitimacy.

So now the PFOX website has a big page announcing:

Peer-Reviewed Study

and it goes on with a press release apparently written by Warren Throckmorton to announce that he has had a paper accepted by a journal.

Now, you must know that "publish or perish" is the rule in real universities. You don't get tenure without publishing. Even though an apparently self-written online bio says "His academic articles have been published by journals of the American Psychological Association," there seems to be a bit of inflation in those esses at the end of "article" and "journal." He did have an article published in 2002 in the APA journal Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. And I think that's it. Somebody can write in the comments here if they know of anything else -- Throckmorton is not the kind to keep quiet about these things. I think he has published one article in a minor APA journal. He also published one in 1998 in The Journal of Mental Health Counseling, which is not an APA journal.

The press release for his new article says:

The Journal of Psychology and Christianity is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Christian Association of Psychological Studies. Edited by American Psychological Association Fellow, Peter Hill, PhD,the journal publishes only 28% of the articles submitted making it a highly selective journal of scholarship and research for scholars in psychology and religion.

Now, I don't have any issue with Christian psychologists. There are certainly some very rich psychological traditions surrounding the church, and these might serve to inspire hypotheses worthy of scientific research. Further, spirituality is a psychological factor that is often overlooked, and I would be glad to see more research done regarding that. And not this stupid what-part-of-your-brain-is-God-in stuff, I mean to study the parts of the human psyche that transform life into something worth caring about.

I went to the Journal of Psychology and Christianity web site. Here's what they say about themselves:

The Journal of Psychology and Christianity (JPC) is an official publication of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies, Inc.(CAPS), designed to provide scholarly interchange among Christian professionals in the psychological and pastoral professions. Journal articles focus on clinical topics, research, theoretical issues and special theme areas. A book review section is also included in each issue. The journal is published quarterly in March, June, September, & December. Both solicited and unsolicited manuscripts must be submitted to the Editor. A board of referees evaluates and selects articles for publication.

Again, it sounds like a nice journal, they don't claim to publish "scientific research" but rather "provide scholarly interchange" among professionals.

That last sentence asks to be repeated, though:

A board of referees evaluates and selects articles for publication.

This is not peer review.

"Peer review" is a term you hear, but it is rarely explained. Oh, good, WikiPedia -- which I just love, by the way, it's such a cool idea -- has a chapter on Peer Review. They define it like this:

Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. Publishers and funding agencies use peer review to select and to screen submissions. The process also forces authors to meet the standards of their discipline. Publications and awards that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals in many fields.

All of this sounds quite accurate to me -- I review articles for more than a dozen different journals, and this is what it's like:

Peer review subjects an author's work or ideas to the scrutiny of one or more others who are experts in the field. These referees each return an evaluation of the work, including suggestions for improvement, to an editor or other intermediary (typically, most of the referees' comments are eventually seen by the author as well). Evaluations usually include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript or proposal, often chosen from a menu provided by the journal or funding agency. Most recommendations are along the lines of the following:

• to unconditionally accept the manuscript or proposal,
  
• to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways,
  
• to reject it, but encourage revision and invite resubmission
  
• to reject it outright.

During this process, the role of the referees is advisory, and the editor is under no formal obligation to accept the opinions of the referees. Furthermore, in scientific publication, the referees do not act as a group, do not communicate with each other, and typically are not aware of each other's identities. There is usually no requirement that the referees achieve consensus. Thus the group dynamics is substantially different from that of a jury. In situations where the referees disagree about the quality of a work, there are a number of strategies for reaching a decision.

Traditionally reviewers would remain anonymous to the authors, but this is slowly changing. In some academic fields most journals now offer the reviewer the option of remaining anonymous or not; papers sometimes contain, in the acknowledgments section, thanks to (anonymous or named) referees who helped improve the paper.

That may be more than you wanted to know about the subject, but this is a very accurate description of the process. I don't know about the part about revealing reviewers' identities to the authors, I've never seen that. I mean, you always try to figure out who they are, and sometimes somebody'll say something at a conference, like, "Hey, I reviewed your paper," but generally you never know.

OK, so that is peer review.

Going back...

A board of referees evaluates and selects articles for publication.

It doesn't sound like the same proceess to me, does it to you?

PFOX and similar groups would just love to be able to point to some piece of science that supports their viewpoint. They can't. There isn't any. So when a guy gets a paper published in a friendly little journal for "scholarly interchange" among professionals, they have to try to make it sound like real science.

It'd be funny if it wasn't such such nasty business they're up to.