I’ve been looking at some series that are based on peer-reviewed science like “Missing Links” by Gregg Braden, and I’ve been reading that recent studies use peer-reviewed science, but it’s not clear to me what it really is. If someone could ELI5, I would appreciate it.
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Science is very complicated, at the edge where new discoveries are being made. As a result, the editors of a scientific journal can’t possibly know everything about every research topic. So instead, they keep a rich directory of who is working on what topic. When a paper comes in about topic X, they look up who else they know is working on X. Then they send the paper to these scientists, who are called “peers” of the scientists who wrote the paper. The peers read the paper and point out things that they think are missing or incorrect. The authors of the paper get an anonymous copy of the peer’s comments, and they revise the paper to fix it. Then the peers review it again, etc. When the peers agree the paper is “not wrong”, then the journal feels confident to publish it.
This is a peer-reviewed paper, a much more trustworthy source than a scientist’s blog post.
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