The Peer-Review System Needs a Hard Review

Abstract The SPE President's Column in the Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT) last January, titled "A Cold Look at the Quality of SPE Publications," triggered a lot of discussions on the current state of the peer-review system, within SPE, petroleum engineering (PE), and beyond. Individual publication data from OnePetro were warranted to rationalize concerning observations vis-a-vis current trends in the publication quality within SPE. Several recommendations may be implicitly extracted from that column which was mostly concerned with discussions and attempts to correlate the observed quality drawbacks to the inflated quantity of SPE publications. Nevertheless, this represents only one portion of the problem. Portions of this paper revolve around common practices that compromise the modern-day peer-review system, which is often, sadly, abused with disingenuous exploits to satisfy individual benefits. The quality of articles approved for publication in peer-reviewed journals is deliberated from the standpoint of both the authors and the peer-review system. Ways other than the inflation in the number of publications that offer plausible compromises for the modern-day peer-review system are examined and what emerges are several anachronisms that inadvertently open the door to exploitation (mostly for self-serving purposes), with quite evident quality drops. Finally, some workable solutions are discussed, involving both top-down and bottom-up actions. Apart from the obvious intimate bond with a single industry (in fact one sector of that industry), PE has a-priori certain peculiarities that distinguish it from other disciplines and this paper attempts to deal with some of them. Although the impact of these matters is way broader than the PE discipline per se, it should represent a major issue of concern for our community. A tough stand against these quality-deterioration trends is paramount in importance. At stake is not only the legacy of PE's archival literature, but also the integrity of the peer-review processes.