Amen. Coming from physics to biology, I've seen some abuse. But as noted, the inverse is true as well. The last manuscript I read was for a new journal, and was laughably poor. It was a review of the literature that had no focus, offered no perspective, no synthesis, was ridiculously shallow, and had no unifying thread. It wouldn't have made the grade as a freshman paper. As a high school paper, maybe it would deserve a C. My advice was to reject. The other reviewer praised the work. All is not well in scientific publishing.
I took a course about a year and a half ago on Science & Technology policy, and we actually had a couple of lectures about publishing, academic funding, and the peer review process. Some of the issues that were discussed were the lack of an overarching guideline for reviewers, politics and cronyism, and the desire to publish articles that are "sexy" or easy to peddle. Do those sound about right?
Definitely a lack of guidelines. The rest as well. It's not all bad, but the process could be improved. Journals are almost unnecessary at this point, as they no longer serve their primary objectives as well as online services can. I don't read any journals. I peruse the literature by searching databases, and getting keyword-specific updates. The idea that journals have an impact factor creates bad incentives. It would be nice to lose that.
I'd go farther: you can peddle bad math to almost any scientist but a mathematician who does other science. Doctors are the worst - they're not scientists but we treat them that way. Based on the krep models behind climate science, maybe they are the worst actual scientists. -XC
The evil bigot that lives in my heart rolls his devil eyes every time one of the authors of a paper has a MD after his name. I brace for the stupid that always follows.