Everyone rants about peer review, but what isn't very well known is that the process serves two purposes, says Chris Lee at Ars Technica. It both decides the value of research — something Lee says it does very well — and serves as "a gatekeeper for scientific funding" — which, Lee says, it doesn't do as well. In the first case, the great benefit to peer review is that it examines a researcher's methods well, Lee says.