That’s not the whole story. In my field of precision measurement, for example, the community is very small, such that you can easily identify the author of the paper solely by its content. There’s a lot of trust that is crucial for the peer review process to make sense; for example, a reviewer would ask, “Have you looked into whether changing X causes a change in your results?” And we would reply, “We tried that by using methods Y and Z but it did not cause a change.” There is no completely infallible way (short of visiting our experiment in person and asking for the data) to verify that we are not lying or exaggerating. But there is mutual trust that everyone has sufficient scientific integrity, competence and meticulousness to conduct their experiments properly and pursue any loose ends.
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