How to find who peer-reviewed publication ?

[empleat]

It is easy to find if an article was peer-reviewed, but who reviewed it ? That's important as well. It could have been scientist, which claims nobel prize winners eaten chocolate, therefore eating chocolate increases intelligence... I found an interesting publication and i would like to check who reviewed it. Not sure if there is a way to find out. If site for publications is of high quality, article itself is probably legit, but nothing is 100% perfect. I am honestly surprised, that you can't see who peer-reviewed it as well as names of authors, because it makes sense.

Edited April 28, 2020 by empleat

[Strange]

Reviewers are nearly always anonymous. There are pros and cons (and some people doubt the value of the current review system anyway).

This article has a good summary of why they are anonymous and some other points of view: https://massivesci.com/articles/peer-review-anonymous-signed/

But I can't see why knowing who the reviewers were would be of value to the readers of the paper.

[empleat]

I usually like to read pages on wiki about authors, because there are some biased people, which think because people with OCD, can overcome their problem. That implies, that mind is immaterial or something. I don't even...

[taeto]

16 hours ago, empleat said:

I usually like to read pages on wiki about authors, because there are some biased people, which think because people with OCD, can overcome their problem. That implies, that mind is immaterial or something. I don't even...

Neither do I. But generally reviewers are anonymous, and sometimes the reviewer is not even allowed to know the identity of the author(s), such as for ""double-blind" review.

If you somehow have access to the review, you may have clues to figure out the identity of the reviewer. Most directly if you find a pdf with the review, and the format of the pdf reveals explicitly from where it originated. Mostly though it is not realistic.

Once I was a referee of a long paper written by a close colleague, who was incidentally also the external examiner at my M.Sc. examination. I wrote a long report on this paper, which obviously he got to read. It would have been an important result, but the paper contained a small but important mistake somewhere around page 60 or so, which could not be repaired, and the submission got rejected. I asked him later if he knew from the style of the report who the reviewer might have been, and he said no, and told me that lots of reviewers use too similar styles in their reports to make them identifiable.

17 hours ago, empleat said:

It is easy to find if an article was peer-reviewed

That may not be completely accurate. There are "predatory" journals that mainly exist because authors pay money for "submission fees", so that they can be nearly guaranteed to have their paper appear in print, which adds to their cv. Such a journal may ask for a few corrections of misprints and bad grammar, but they have no interest in rejecting a paper on scientific grounds, because that would cut into their revenue.

17 hours ago, empleat said:

I found an interesting publication 

This is an MDPI journal. Wikipedia says "The quality of MDPI's peer review has been disputed. MDPI was included on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies in 2014, but was removed in 2015 following a successful appeal." I do not know the details. But I would be very cautious to trust a paper that has gone through the peer-review of an MDPI publication without first checking it carefully myself. 

18 hours ago, empleat said:

publication  as well as names of authors

Sometimes you can tell by googling the names of the authors. 

If we take the first author of your paper, Klee Irwin, we get from RationalWiki the information that Klee Irwin is a pseudoscience proponent and fraudster. He became widely known for his infomercials for "Dual Action Cleanse", a "natural" remedy, which was subject to numerous lawsuits. Some have reported being scammed by his company. 

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest you not be worried. This paper has not seen a peer-review in the ordinary sense of the word.

[taeto]

And adding some quotes from Jeffrey Beall found in Wikipedia: ...it is clear that MDPI sees peer review as merely a perfunctory step that publishers have to endure before publishing papers and accepting money from the authors and that it's clear that MDPI's peer review is managed by clueless clerical staff in China."