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peer review

Q14. Was there any formal peer-review of Lomborg’s book?

Submitted by richardbell on September 20, 2007 - 6:47pm.

Lomborg does not mention having submitted his book to any kind of formal peer-review process.

The book's U.S. publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, is in business of making money, not publishing peer-reviewed scientific literature. Knopf could have checked Lomborg’s facts; the New Yorker magazine is renown for its fact-checking department. But fact-checking costs money. So the reader is on her own, stuck with some of the smallest-type footnotes that I have ever seen in a mass market hardback. Few readers have the time to go through the references to discover Lomborg’s distortions and quotes edited to favor his argument. (See Q11 above for an example.)

For reasons that are not very explained, the Knopf American edition is considerably shorter than the edition published in Britain. The American edition lacks some of the more scholarly apparatus of the British version, including charts and graphs. Perhaps Knopf thought that American readers would turn away from such stuff, finding the book too fusty and academic.


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