The beauty of peer review

If you want to publish an academic paper, it must pass muster with peer review. This is when an editor sends your paper to several (usually anonymous) readers in the field, and they give it a thumbs up or down.

For those who have gone through this nerve-wracking process, beauty is probably the farthest thing from their minds.

But the roots of peer review are in beauty.

This is because peer review is rooted in the idea of harmonious proportions, which is the oldest and longest-standing theory of beauty in Western history.

In other words, your proposed paper must contain new knowledge that is in harmony with, and in proportion to, the known body of knowledge in your field. And this fact has to be attested to by your peers, not just by you.

It is no accident that bodies of knowledge are called BODIES of knowledge. They are bodies of knowledge because there is a proportion, a rightness, a balance ... there is beauty to how all parts of that body fit together into a conceptual whole.

Either your contribution fits in, or it doesn't. And it's not up to you to say.

This is because beauty, after all, is not in the eye of the beholder. If something is truly beautiful, a community of people must agree that it is.

Now:

Peer review is the academic parallel to the agreement of the saints in church life.

The Body of Christ can only function on healthy peer review.

Otherwise there is no community. In fact you may end up with no-Body at all.

At least the beauty will have gone out of it.

Logos2Go

New Testament terms associated with the above contemplation: Fellowship (metoche): partnership, sharing in, partaking of. Communion (koinonia): sharing in common, joint participation, association. Accord (sumphonesis): a sounding together (concord, kjv). Agreement (sunkatathesis): a putting together or joint deposit, approval. Part (meris): a part as distinct from the whole, an assigned part, a portion. This citation is from "Fellowship and Unity of Believers": http://www.bibleanswer.com/fellowshipandunity.htm

The leading academic paper outlining the theory of beauty in proportions: Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz “The Great Theory of Beauty and its Decline” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 31, no. 2, 1972, 165-180.