Peer review promises that articles undergo scientific scrutiny prior to publication. This is supposed to increase trust into the content of the article, but can peer review overcome a bias inherent to a field? A short look (without any scrutiny) into the editorial board of the Pest Management Science journal produced by the Society of Chemical Industry already reveals a bias. The editors seem to overwhelmingly stem from fields that have an interest in the continued reasearch of agricultural products such as biocides. Additionally, associates of major companies from the chemical sector are members of the board.
With such a setup it seems likely that numerous studies are found that promote the use of pesticides or play down ecological effects. I suppose the oppopsite is true for ecological science. I suspect few studies that would promote the use of pesticides or fertilizers. These problems fall into the categories of selection bias and confirmation bias.
Still both sides have their merits. It is unlikely that the world could do completely without pesticides, nor can we disregard adverse effects of pesticides a better way would be to weigh the respective advantages and disadvantages and then come to a conclusion but it seems that this process is outsourced to other domains such as policy and the public. The question is: Is this okay?
One could argue that if both sides (or possibly more) adhere to the rules of good scientific practice which is rigorously checked in the peer review process, the decision maker or reader has (theoretically) all the resources at hand to make an informed decision. In this case it should not matter that publications are biased since biases should cancel each other out, if enough sources are considered.
However, the world is not perfect and seldom does a decision making process involve all available information (due to lack of time, knowledge, …). Thus decisions can be biased. Moreover, if one side at the table is underrepresented due to lacking lobby, funding or awareness, decisions will be unevitably biased.
Therefore, I argue that it would be beneficial to include an instance of bias control in the review process (without knowing how such a thing would work).