Happy Sunday − and welcome to the best of The Conversation U.S. Here are a few of our recently published stories:

• How the ‘big, beautiful bill’ will deepen the racial wealth gap
• Clawback of $1.1B for PBS and NPR puts rural stations at risk

To those of us outside academia, peer review can seem like a mysterious or opaque concept. When a paper is identified as “peer reviewed,” it’s supposed to signal the gold standard for good science. Most of the research we write about and cite at The Conversation has gone through peer review. If a study survives this rigorous process, it means it’s made it through challenges from outside experts who validate that the conclusions stand up – before we share them with our readers.

But what actually is peer review and how does it work?

“This process isn’t new. Versions of peer review have been around for centuries,” writes Joshua Winowiecki, a scholar at Michigan State University who conducts reviews of research in nursing and health care and teaches others to do so critically. “Today, it is central to how scientific publishing works, and nowhere more so than health, nursing and medicine. Research that survives review is more likely to be trusted and acted upon by health care practitioners and their patients.”

As part of a series we’re doing to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at how science is done, Winowiecki explains the process of peer review, describes its importance and points out some of its flaws.

“Even though the current peer-review system has its shortcomings, most researchers would argue that science is better off than it would be without the level of scrutiny peer review provides,” he writes. “The challenge now is how to make peer review better.”