Editorial board in the context of "Daniel Dennett"

Scholarly peer review or academic peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed (usually anonymously) by experts (or "peers") in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief, the editorial board or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.

Academic peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) academic field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is generally considered necessary to academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals. However, peer review does not prevent publication of invalid research, and as experimentally controlled studies of this process are difficult to arrange, direct evidence that peer review improves the quality of published papers is scarce. One recent analysis of randomized controlled trial abstracts found that editorial and peer review processes led to substantive improvements between submission and publication.

An editorial, or leading article (UK) or leader (UK), is an article or any other written document, often unsigned, written by the senior editorial people or publisher of a newspaper or magazine, that expresses the publication's opinion about a particular topic or issue. Australian and major United States newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, often classify editorials under the heading "opinion".

An op-ed is a type of written prose that expresses a strong, focused opinion on an issue of relevance to the target audience, and is commonly found in newspapers, magazines, and online publications. Typically ranging from 500 to 700 words, op-eds are distinct from articles written by the publication's editorial board and often feature the opinions of outside contributors. Op-eds allow authors, not part of the publication's editorial team, to express opinions, perspectives, and arguments on various issues of public interest. Unlike traditional editorials, which reflect the opinion of the publication itself, op-eds offer independent voices a foundation to influence public discourse. The New York Times is widely credited with popularizing the modern op-ed format.

The editorial board at The Wall Street Journal writes opinion articles in The Wall Street Journal and selects opinion articles by outside parties for publication. The editorial board is known for its very conservative positions, which at times bring it into conflict with the Journal's news division.

The Journal is regarded as a forum for climate change deniers, publishing articles by people who reject the consensus position on climate change in its op-ed section. A 2011 study found that the Journal was alone among major U.S. print news media in adopting a false balance that overplays the uncertainty in climate science or denies anthropogenic climate change altogether.