4 ms·

Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed and are only available in publications that cost a lot of money to obtain. Why am I not surpris

Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed and are only available in publications that cost a lot of money to obtain. Why am I not surprised that most of those papers aren't brought to the attention of the public at large? In fact, I'm not only surprised, I'm pleased. Many of them will be making outlandish claims that can't be backed up through peer review. The public would jump on them like they were fact, though, since a 'scientist' published it. Scientific discovers that are news-worthy DO get published to the public. This is really not an issue.

bbgm 15y ago
> Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed Now, I am not the biggest fan of peer review, but in my discipline, you can't publish a smile without peer review in any meaningful journal. Most good science never ends up in the press, cause media simply can't relate to it. I always think about PCR. If it was "discovered today", would something as profoundly important even get a whimper of attention?
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Scientific discovers that are news-worthy DO get published to the public. Where by "the public" you mean "people who are willing to pay the Nature Publications Group $32 per article, or subscribe to Nature for a few hundred bucks per year per journal, or who happen to routinely take the time to travel to a library which subscribes to the Nature journals." In other words, you mean: Other scientists. Which is what this study apparently tries to back up with actual statistics. Scientific publications aren't secret, exactly. They're just orders of magnitude more obscure than everything else in our society. I can sit in a chair and read entire encyclopedias of trivia, download entire albums and movies, I can buy the complete works of various popular novelists and read them on my Kindle for ten bucks apiece, I can barely avoid learning about the various memes of the day, yet I can't read the average scientific article unless I'm paying tuition, working as a postdoc, physically sitting in MIT's library, or willing to pay the cost of a hardcover book.
- tensor 15y ago
  There are a few tricks to obtaining science publications without paying the journals. 1) Publications are increasingly easy to find via services such as google scholar, pubmed, and citeseer. Often times, these services will link to freely downloadable versions of the paper. However, should this not be the case, you still have two options. 2) Go to the author's website. It's very common for academics to put preprints or other free versions of their papers on their personal websites. You may need to check all the authors on the paper, but a good rule of thumb is to check the first listed author and the last listed author. 3) If the above isn't available and you really want to get access to the paper, you can always try emailing the authors and asking for a copy. As with personal copies on websites, giving out copies to those who ask is allowed by most journals. 4) As you point out, you can physically go to a library and use a public terminal. Most large cities have universities. Save up the hard to find references and make a weekly or monthly trip to the local university library. In the far past, you used to have to go down into the "stacks" at a university and dig out a physical copy of a paper you wanted. These stacks were not always accessible to the public and did not always contain the journal you wanted. In comparison, academic material today is more accessible to the average member of the public than it has ever been.
  - orillian 15y ago
    There is a small issue with your tricks and that is that the end user...you or I, knows about the paper in the first place and are trying to gain access to it. The broader issue as I see it, is that for a layperson or a hobbyist in a scientific field it is near impossible to find papers that you did not hear about through the media or by being in proximity to the authors. If you do happen upon them, it's usually by pure dumb luck and happenstance. More centralized and open locations for discourse are required. How about a ycombinator for scientific research? o.
    - tensor 15y ago
      There is definitely a need for services that collect, categorize, and disseminate new scientific information in an easy to understand fashion. These types of services would be valuable both to the public and to researchers. The trouble is that services needs to be domain specific and it is likely a full time job to continually mine the journals for new content. User submissions are an excellent idea, but probably not sufficient on their own. For example, there is already HN-like site for biomed: http://hackermed.com/hot http://hackermed.com/hot There is opportunity here, especially in the areas like health and fitness which are more popular to the public.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
They're peer reviewed by the journal before publication. Journals receive a black eye when they publish something that turned out to be bad science and it affects their influence. There are plenty of bad journals that specialize in publishing pseudoscience, but no one pays attention to them.
- orillian 15y ago
  The sad truth of your comment is that in many cases the scientific community by its very nature, is forced to ratify and review everything so that it can withstand the critical eye. Many discoveries in the past come from failed experiments. The failing to achive a desired result can have as much merit for future discovery as a successful enterprise. The scientific community balks at learning from others mistakes and has a tendancy to ostracise those that failed. I personally enjoy the insights into the mindsets and thoughs behind an avenue of research, successful or failed. I find it helps give me a glimps at what others feel is possible. O.
  - beza1e1 15y ago
    In my field (compilers), i'm often dumbfounded what garbage gets published. I do not even want to see the stuff that was rejected.
kenjackson 15y ago
Most of this just not true. Read almost any journal of repute, from Nature to Science to JAMA to Algorithmica -- they're all peer reviewed. And most scientific papers actually don't make outlandish claims. If anything they make rather mundane claims. For example, a new algorithm for Q-SAT that reduces the complexity in the presence of a K-Oracle from O(3.5^mn) to O(pi^m(3.5/pi)n).
- tokenadult 15y ago
  most scientific papers actually don't make outlandish claims. If anything they make rather mundane claims I'd love to hear your comment on the suggestion http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... that most published research findings are false, despite peer review.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    I'd read the back and forth on this controversy when it happened, and in general I agree with that article -- as it applies to fields such as medicine. It applies less to fields like CS (although there's data that proofs are frequently wrong). A common mistake is to do things such as mining for correlations. A stronger grounding in statistics would definitely help most scientists (and ppl in general -- one reason I support the push to replace calculus with statistics in HS math). Although oddly, even if most finding are false they typically create the basis to do an actual real follow-up study, with actual hypothesis' which are much more likely to give real results. IOW, these false findings still accelerate the rate that science occurs. Although better science upfront would be more efficient still.
tokenadult 15y ago
Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed I see you are being severely downvoted, and disagreed with specifically on the quoted point. Did you perhaps mean "Scientists tend to issue press releases about studies that aren't yet peer-reviewed"? I can think of several examples of that, which have been posted here to HN. The most notorious recent example was the "arsenic-based life" example, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/debate-over-arsenic-based-life-enters-a-new-chapter/2011/05/26/AGhk7fCH_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/debate-over-arsenic-b... the subject of several HN threads. Jumping the gun on the peer review process by issuing press releases before peer review does seem to be a common failing, and altogether too many submissions to HN on science issues are based on such press releases. But as mechanical_fish points out, it would help the situation for the general public (and journalists) if the actual peer-reviewed scientific literature, with all its faults http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... were readily available to members of the general public.

bbgm 15y ago

> Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed Now, I am not the biggest fan of peer review, but in my discipline, you can't publish a smile without peer review in any meaningful journal. Most good science never ends up in the press, cause media simply can't relate to it. I always think about PCR. If it was "discovered today", would something as profoundly important even get a whimper of attention?

mechanical_fish 15y ago

Scientific discovers that are news-worthy DO get published to the public. Where by "the public" you mean "people who are willing to pay the Nature Publications Group $32 per article, or subscribe to Nature for a few hundred bucks per year per journal, or who happen to routinely take the time to travel to a library which subscribes to the Nature journals." In other words, you mean: Other scientists. Which is what this study apparently tries to back up with actual statistics. Scientific publications aren't secret, exactly. They're just orders of magnitude more obscure than everything else in our society. I can sit in a chair and read entire encyclopedias of trivia, download entire albums and movies, I can buy the complete works of various popular novelists and read them on my Kindle for ten bucks apiece, I can barely avoid learning about the various memes of the day, yet I can't read the average scientific article unless I'm paying tuition, working as a postdoc, physically sitting in MIT's library, or willing to pay the cost of a hardcover book.

tensor 15y ago
There are a few tricks to obtaining science publications without paying the journals. 1) Publications are increasingly easy to find via services such as google scholar, pubmed, and citeseer. Often times, these services will link to freely downloadable versions of the paper. However, should this not be the case, you still have two options. 2) Go to the author's website. It's very common for academics to put preprints or other free versions of their papers on their personal websites. You may need to check all the authors on the paper, but a good rule of thumb is to check the first listed author and the last listed author. 3) If the above isn't available and you really want to get access to the paper, you can always try emailing the authors and asking for a copy. As with personal copies on websites, giving out copies to those who ask is allowed by most journals. 4) As you point out, you can physically go to a library and use a public terminal. Most large cities have universities. Save up the hard to find references and make a weekly or monthly trip to the local university library. In the far past, you used to have to go down into the "stacks" at a university and dig out a physical copy of a paper you wanted. These stacks were not always accessible to the public and did not always contain the journal you wanted. In comparison, academic material today is more accessible to the average member of the public than it has ever been.
- orillian 15y ago
  There is a small issue with your tricks and that is that the end user...you or I, knows about the paper in the first place and are trying to gain access to it. The broader issue as I see it, is that for a layperson or a hobbyist in a scientific field it is near impossible to find papers that you did not hear about through the media or by being in proximity to the authors. If you do happen upon them, it's usually by pure dumb luck and happenstance. More centralized and open locations for discourse are required. How about a ycombinator for scientific research? o.
  - tensor 15y ago
    There is definitely a need for services that collect, categorize, and disseminate new scientific information in an easy to understand fashion. These types of services would be valuable both to the public and to researchers. The trouble is that services needs to be domain specific and it is likely a full time job to continually mine the journals for new content. User submissions are an excellent idea, but probably not sufficient on their own. For example, there is already HN-like site for biomed: http://hackermed.com/hot http://hackermed.com/hot There is opportunity here, especially in the areas like health and fitness which are more popular to the public.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

They're peer reviewed by the journal before publication. Journals receive a black eye when they publish something that turned out to be bad science and it affects their influence. There are plenty of bad journals that specialize in publishing pseudoscience, but no one pays attention to them.

orillian 15y ago
The sad truth of your comment is that in many cases the scientific community by its very nature, is forced to ratify and review everything so that it can withstand the critical eye. Many discoveries in the past come from failed experiments. The failing to achive a desired result can have as much merit for future discovery as a successful enterprise. The scientific community balks at learning from others mistakes and has a tendancy to ostracise those that failed. I personally enjoy the insights into the mindsets and thoughs behind an avenue of research, successful or failed. I find it helps give me a glimps at what others feel is possible. O.
- beza1e1 15y ago
  In my field (compilers), i'm often dumbfounded what garbage gets published. I do not even want to see the stuff that was rejected.

kenjackson 15y ago

Most of this just not true. Read almost any journal of repute, from Nature to Science to JAMA to Algorithmica -- they're all peer reviewed. And most scientific papers actually don't make outlandish claims. If anything they make rather mundane claims. For example, a new algorithm for Q-SAT that reduces the complexity in the presence of a K-Oracle from O(3.5^mn) to O(pi^m(3.5/pi)n).

tokenadult 15y ago
most scientific papers actually don't make outlandish claims. If anything they make rather mundane claims I'd love to hear your comment on the suggestion http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... that most published research findings are false, despite peer review.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I'd read the back and forth on this controversy when it happened, and in general I agree with that article -- as it applies to fields such as medicine. It applies less to fields like CS (although there's data that proofs are frequently wrong). A common mistake is to do things such as mining for correlations. A stronger grounding in statistics would definitely help most scientists (and ppl in general -- one reason I support the push to replace calculus with statistics in HS math). Although oddly, even if most finding are false they typically create the basis to do an actual real follow-up study, with actual hypothesis' which are much more likely to give real results. IOW, these false findings still accelerate the rate that science occurs. Although better science upfront would be more efficient still.

tokenadult 15y ago

Scientists tend to publish papers that aren't yet peer-reviewed I see you are being severely downvoted, and disagreed with specifically on the quoted point. Did you perhaps mean "Scientists tend to issue press releases about studies that aren't yet peer-reviewed"? I can think of several examples of that, which have been posted here to HN. The most notorious recent example was the "arsenic-based life" example, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/debate-over-arsenic-based-life-enters-a-new-chapter/2011/05/26/AGhk7fCH_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/debate-over-arsenic-b... the subject of several HN threads. Jumping the gun on the peer review process by issuing press releases before peer review does seem to be a common failing, and altogether too many submissions to HN on science issues are based on such press releases. But as mechanical_fish points out, it would help the situation for the general public (and journalists) if the actual peer-reviewed scientific literature, with all its faults http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... were readily available to members of the general public.