4 ms·
Speaking from the perspective of life science, I think the idea of the "article" and "review" as two separate complimentary parts of constructing knowledge actu
by entee 11y ago
Speaking from the perspective of life science, I think the idea of the "article" and "review" as two separate complimentary parts of constructing knowledge actually makes a lot of sense.
An individual article is an argument, with evidence for how some process works. A review looks at all the papers, getting the more global view of "knowledge" the OP seems to want.
Perhaps in the spirit of the article we should have reviews that are ongoing, sort of like wiki pages for various research areas. These might capture a living, complete state of the field better than current review articles.
It's really unclear how this would be done though because:
1.) How fields and areas interact is constantly changing, how do you manage the merging and splitting of review articles? You end up with a confusing view of "what we know" once again.
2.) As others have noted, who gets to write these things? The cutting edge literature is full of big personalities in conflict with one another. It takes years to figure out who is actually right.
That said, at a minimum retractions should be much easier to track. I'll bet we'd save a whole bunch of wasted effort.
- tormeh 11y agoWell, now Wikipedia is the review. Depending on the field, you may just do all the real research on Wikipedia and then add in citations in your paper to look professional. How about a Wikipedia with original research? "Sciencepedia"? Each article gets a section for each editor. If you want to contribute you can either submit a pull request to an editor you view favourably or you can write your own section. Sections can be voted up or down.
- jszymborski 11y agoWikipedia is not the review, not in the life sciences sense of the word. A review, despite "reviewing" the literature, offers a unique perspective, and does have an argument, although one that is based solely on the aggregation of existing evidence and literature. Wikipedia just describes parts of the field, reviews offer insight and perspective.
- return0 11y agoThere is scholarpedia, which was initially crippled by the fact that each article (which was similar to a review) would often be limited to the (invited and authoritative) author's point of view. In fact they have iterated their policies . Still their contents are often adapted copies of review articles published in "real" journals.
- return0 11y agoI think that's the spirit of what he proposes. A possible way to organize the fluid current knowledge would be as a network of scientific questions, which depend on one another (like a bugzilla for science). Having a list of articles that answer positively vs negatively to every question would give an immediate view of the scientific consensus, would allow everyone to make their own judgement about the quality of research and importantly, would pinpoint gaps in knowledge thus pointing out possible research directions.
- jonlucc 11y agoAnother thing that complicates this in the life sciences is that techniques aren't standard. If I use 8 month old rats and draw blood in the morning, I will likely have different gene expression and protein content than your study that uses 4 month old rats of the same strain and draw blood at night. Each article includes these details, and it is very hard to know if the result is more generally true, or only true for the conditions of my study. It is for this reason that reviews are important and difficult to replace with some constantly-updating model of information release.
- secstate 11y agoHrm. But if each article includes these details but there is no way to generalize the findings, how is a review going to help? Scientist A doing the study claims X effect when using 8 month old rats and drawing blood in the morning. Scientist B comes along and says, "looks like sound science to me, conclusion is valid!" But Scientist B has no idea if some gene expression and protein content are the result of the blood draw time, the age of the rats, or the temperature of the lab. How can ANY review be effective if there are no other studies on 8-month old rat blood drawn in the morning in a colder room? The problem with comparative studies here is also a problem with peer reviews, and more generally, a problem with life sciences and the idea of controls v. variables.