I just read an article in The Scientist entitled: The Hype of Science:Leading Journals including Science and Nature are exaggerating research novelty. . Based on the “quality” of reporting in this article I may have to cross-post with the Writers Forum. The comments that follow the article are worth the read as well. I would be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this article. To me I agree with some of the comments that this may be a case of the pot calling the kettle.
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Article in The Scientist - April 16th, 2009
- Date:
- Thursday, 16 Apr il 2009 - 20:30 UTC
Last updated: Thursday, 16 Apr 2009 - 20:30 UTC
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Comments
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Craig – I’m glad you brought this up. I wondered whether it might appear on here. I imagine there was some elevated blood pressure in Crinnan Street yesterday. It did occur to me that The Scientist were on dangerous ground in starting to throw mud around.
It’s not particularly surprising – scientists continually have to (over)hype their results, in order to publish in high profile journals, in order to remain competitive. It’s a bit of a vicious circle, that doesn’t do the scientific process justice. Whether it’s novelty, or applicability or something else, we have to sell, sell, sell our ideas to get publications, media attention and funding.
What is more detrimental is when journal editors
pressure, shall we say, encourage, authors to oversell a point in an article that doesn’t have robust experimental/empirical support.I have been assured this happens by authors whose work has been published in at least one high profile journal. Not sure if I should name names here to enforce the point, but we discussed it at a recent journal club meeting on the evidence for Fisheries induced evolution, with an author of a recentish Policy Forum piece. Perhaps you can figure the rest out for yourselves.
Helsinki University also enjoyed a mini Evolution Day yesterday, where the closing talk was an interesting historical perspective of the originators of the idea of evolution by natural selection. The conclusion: Darwin was not novel in this respect (an idea that goes back to , but had accumulated sufficient biological and geological evidence to be the first promote the idea so robustly. Novelty clearly doesn’t have to be the most important feature of influential science!
I haven’t read The Scientist article, but this topic is not exactly novel in itself ;-) I seem to recall reading some similar claims in one of the PLOS journals a few months ago and a bit of a discussion storm or two on Nature Network as a result. Round and round the roundabout…..
Mike – a “Policy Forum” in Science is not original peer-reviewed research, as I understand it?
Novelty clearly doesn’t have to be the most important feature of influential science!
Damn right!
Maxine, my thoughts exactly – after checking with the author, I learned that these articles are “peer reviewed”, but not necessarily original research. It remains ambiguous if these articles try to present interpretations based on research discussed within the article.
Having said that, these are the type of articles that are targeting people with a stake/interest in “Policy” or real world applications of scientific research, therefore, any scientific claims relating to real world applications should definitely not be embellished.
By the way, the natural selection idea can be traced back to Classical Greek times – Henry probably remembers more about that sort of thing…
Maxine: I agree this argument(I actually think it was more a bit of PR by The Scientist) will continue to exist for as long as there are Journals that are considered to be the “best”.
As for hyping ones findings. . .This is salesmanship and anyone who thinks that this is not an important part of Science (in general not just the journal) is fooling themselves. Scientists have to learn how to hype without overselling or false advertising, like all companies. Do journals encourage this? More likely they help to tease-out the most interesting and intriguing components of a research article which is not a bad thing, as long as the science backs the claim.
I think that is right, Craig (referring to your last sentence above). At Nature, anyway, a submitted paper goes through several rounds of, shall I say “mitigation”, in which editors and peer-reviewers rigorously encourage the claims to be toned down so that they do not outstrip the data. Then, when the paper is accepted, the challenge for editors, the press office and the authors themselves when interviewed or otherwise discussing their work with nonspecialists and nonscientists, is to describe the results in a comprehensible context without overshooting the claim. From what I observe, everyone in the chain is responsible about it, but of course there will always be those who want to criticise and carp. In the long run, the results will stand the test of time and repeat experiments (or not), and they will speak for themselves.
Mike – “Policy forums” at Science have elements of Commentaries and Features at Nature. Commenteries at Nature tend not to be peer reviewed unless they are based on a research premise. They are essentially “opinion” articles. Features, on the other hand, are less opinionated and more solid, for example comparisons of “scientific output” of various countries. These are peer-reviewed, usually. I think that if a journal makes the parameters of its article types clear here are the Nature journal article types and explanations, then that’s fine – variety is the spice of life for the reader.