It’s hard enough to find good papers without the literature being further polluted with substandard work.

The job of a reviewer isn’t a simple yes/no answer. Reviewers often suggest sweeping changes to work to make it publishable. This helps to ensure that the literature is populated with well put together work that is free of bias and glaring mistakes. Otherwise we’d spend every minute helping students to spot the difference and wading through misleading research.

I already spend far too much time doing this. I can't imagine how futile literature research would be without peer review. There are already enough illogical conclusions and poor study designs to wade through.

Before peer review they were not dealing with the volume of scientific content that is submitted nowadays. One could debate whether citations are the only metric necessary, but there needs to be a filter before that even happens, or else we will be flooded with an avalanche of garbage research. It would be trivial for someone with deep enough pockets to order a network of junk papers citing each other and debunking climate change or evolution and make a real mess. As painful as reviewing is, it's a necessary evil for now.

Things might be ignored, but only after a person has already wasted their time looking at it and determining it is crap.

It was harder for cranks to publish back when journals were purely physical and a crank would have to come up with the printing costs himself. Now that anyone can publish for free on the internet, peer review is even more important for establishing what content out there is worth paying attention to and which is not.

Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit.

Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?

I neglect those because journals in my own field are both free to publish in and, more often than not, open-access. I do understand that not everyone is so fortunate, however.

The otter article, for example, appears to be a well-researched analysis of otter populations in Alaskan waters correlated with human settlement and economic activities. The pumpkin latte article looks into the correlation of light colors and whiteness and advertising in the US, an issue which frequently pops up in marketing gaffes (including one as recently as last week for a beer commercial). The queer organizing article looks at diversity in organizations, analyzed using sociological framework (i.e., "norms") rather than the business management framework. The Sausage Party article is an academic analysis of the movie, which is a surprisingly deep commentary of race, gender, and ethnicity in the U.S.

The above is a completely fraudulent article that was accepted for publication to demonstrate the counter point to your argument. The article is literally gibberish, but got through 'peer-review'. I know the lead author on this one and she did this to make a point about the inconsistency of peer review. The article so clearly fake that its laughable, but that is the point.

I don't want to discuss the merits of individual papers, but I think as a whole they say something worrying about the current state of academic publishing.

So, let me just tell you why I am annoyed and concerned with these and similar papers:

1. Often, they torture language, in that the authors don't seem to write to elucidate and educate, but to obfuscate. (I'm well aware that scientific fields develop their own jargon; that it is useful; that the meaning of a term doesn't necessarily correspond with the ordinary meaning; etc. But even granting all that, it seems to me that a lot of that writing is wilfully opaque and unnecessarily jargon laden.) (Note BTW that you communicated the gist and utility of the articles much better than the authors themselves.)

2. Publishing "pursuant to mandatory thesis requirements" is part of the problem: people get degrees and university positions with research that does not expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Autoethnographic research is particularly galling in that respect (such as a recent paper about the time the author fell of a chair).

3. They delegitimise academia. There used to be a very broad consensus in most societies that education and research is immensely valuable and ought to be supported by government, and that academics should have immense freedom to pursue what they deem important and valuable without any interference and censorship (the essence of tenure). Papers such as these corrode that consensus.

4. Critical theory papers are ineffectual, I'd say, in achieving their laudable goals. I was going to mention MLK and Marx and Keynes ("Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."), but this is too long as it is.

5. "Publish or perish" and Pay-to-publish open access also rear their ugly head.

I maintain that not only rejected papers, but also some accepted papers are shocking.

So, yes, you would need to assign a reputation to citations. I don’t think that’s a solved problem or even simpler than the problem of assigning reputation to papers.

So in the short run, you still need a prospective measure of scientific value, and acceptance for publication in a selective journal ("impact factor") serves that purpose well.

Note that my supposed idea was to use 'pagerank' to replace reference count as the value of a work. Not to replace peer review.