Any actual scientists on this site?

Perhaps, but most of them would take their turn at it anyway. Don't forget that peer review is a fundamental step in the Scientific Method which requires a significant portion of the world's scientific effort. Not just reading the papers submitted for publication in scientific journals, but examining physical evidence, checking through original recordings, repeating steps in the project, reviewing logic.

Another fundamental principle is that a theory can never be proven but only disproven. So if a dozen peers find no flaw in the theory and only one does, it is disproven--or at least ready for someone else to peer-review the peer review and double-check that scientist's work. Therefore it behooves us to throw a fair number of bodies into the peer review step of a project--especially one that falls under yet another principle: Extraordinary Assertions Require Extraordinary Substantiation.

We need all those scientists who spend their time reviewing. Perhaps you're right and some of them don't have the creativity to do original research but they have the patience, eye for detail, and levels of decomposition to spot weaknesses in other people's work. In that case I'd say we're blessed.

I'm reminded of my own field, software development. Most I.T. shops have a staff of programmers debugging production software, fully half the number of the ones building new stuff. Troubleshooting is an honored skill and there are a lot of brilliant programmers who just love doing it. In fact, as I have posted in several other threads, considering the state of the art in software, we need even more people engaged in debugging, especially during the final testing phases before the product is delivered to the long-suffering end user.

Science has its specialties and it's perfectly fine that one of them is peer reviewing itself!

Perhaps you will be heartened by a nice illustration of the power of science. Never forget that in an entire civilization filled with proto-scientists who were willing to "play ball" to avoid being called blasphemers... we only needed a single Galileo.

That's an issue that seems to pop up regularly in science. And science proves itself to be so durable that it survives.

The problem that we're seeing in science today in America is that in the peer review process the government and the corporations are taking over the role of the Inquisitors. Scientists are no longer burned at the stake, but heresy is punished by dismissal in a sector where non-corporate, non-government jobs are hard to get. Fortunately we still have our heroes who speak out anyway.

Only if you wore a lab coat or burned off your eyebrows at least once.

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If you really think that you are this generation's Galileo, with the original research to upset the foundations of science (which btw are built much more soundly since Galileo), then hang in there. History and science are on your side.

Whether you are or not, in science the odds are always stacked in favor of the truth coming out eventually.

You can hardly use SciForms as a model of the world's science community. Too many trolls, not enough actual scientists, and the vast majority of members range from only being interested in science but not having a lot of background in it... to less than that. The few of us who keep this place running can't possibly do proper peer reviews and the average member--who is in high school--is even less qualified and/or interested. We can take comfort in the fact that no one is going to announce a scientific breakthrough HERE and do our best to filter the woo-woo out of the tertiary and quaternary research that trickles down to us.

There is hardly a shortage in today's America of places that will happily publish woo-woo so it's not like we're actually putting the faith healers and Evolution Denialists out of business in case one of them discovers that the world actually is flat.

 

One of the things that constantly frustrates me is that a moderator can't give people infractions for posting junk science.

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We may not be scientists but we have to behave like scientists. We have to treat every assertion fairly and refute it.

 

Earlier on this thread, or perhaps on another one, someone pointed out that although even top scientists can get away with having no talent for engineering, a good engineer has to be at least part scientist. So I go back to my original answer:

I suppose we can add "engineer" to that list, as long as she's doing active work in science.

This is probably where the good engineers come in. Good engineers are happy to have a flawed theory disproven, they love to start by testing simple answers, and they review each other's work. Another principle of science is to start with empirical observations, and they do that too.

Scientists might argue that the standards for entering the engineering profession aren't as high as those for science. But the basic premise holds true that no matter how dearly an engineer believes in the scientific method, he still has to have enough brains and education to not be wrong all the time.

So I don't see any reason that an R&D engineer should not be counted as a scientist, so long as he satisfies the above criteria.