Lecture 10 - How Science Is Communicated I
Science
The next lecture is on how science is communicated. Now your first thought pattern would simply be, well, of course, people give presentations. Of course, people write papers. But the whole idea of how science is communicated is extremely important to a scientifically literate person. For example, we mentioned that the definition of scientific literacy had to do much with abilities. Can you pick up a scientific journal and read it or scientific magazine and read it? One of the problems that we face in society today is that people really have no clue of how science, real research is really communicated by scientists. If people really understood that, they could ask one simple question. Well, what does the peer review journals say? What do you mean by that? What we are referring to is simply this. Science is very heavily policed. There is a process in which if it's not good science, it can't be published. Now, you might say, but we read all kinds of things in the Internet, all kinds of things in magazines. But that is not necessarily the science that's policed by the process of peer review publication. If people understood that peer review research publications in science was the quintessential to understanding if scientists really are supporting this or not, we wouldn't have all of this controversy concerning climate change. Remember on an earlier slide there was this illustration there was this little cartoon that says climate abyss and others say, well no, there is no obesity. There is no climate change issues. And some people are saying, well, maybe it's just in the middle. Well, the reason all of that misunderstanding happens is because people really don't understand to ask the question. Well, what does the peer review scientific research publication say? I was talking to a doctor Warren Washington an African American who's was considered one of the foremost authorities on climate change and environmental sciences as it relates to the atmosphere. And he was actually the adviser to 5 presidents. And I asked him, this was a few years ago. Well, why don't you just debate with some of the individuals that say climate change is not a pun us? And he made an interesting statement. He said, what if I can find any scientists that are published in peer review journals that actually had data to suggest that humans are not creating climate change and that this is not really a punishment. He said, then I'll debate with him. What he was saying in a nutshell is that all of this controversial that climate change is not happening is basically people's opinion who write about climate change and many times they have an agenda. For example, we know the fossil fuel industry doesn't want to see us stop using fossil fuels, oils because that would, if you will, destroy the industry. So a lot of misinformation is put out by politicians or individuals that have a particular desire to keep some economic process alive. And in conclusion what we have to realize is that as it relates to climate change, it's almost a hands down. Peer review research basically suggests that climate change is the planets. We've measured it. We see it is due to fossil fuels. So let's look at how science is communicating part one peer review journals in a little more detail. So in this first slide, in this presentation, house scientific research is communicated. Let's deal with an overview first. Peer reviewed journals. That's what we're going to talk about in this presentation. And peer reviewed journals can be hard copies or can be owned websites and websites and online is another way to size this communicator as well as in magazines. And we have to understand a magazine or information that's published in a website is not necessarily peer review anybody can publish something on a website. Anybody can publish something online. Anyone can if they have enough money can publish something in a magazine. And then finally conferences and we're going to have a whole section on conferences because scientists actually have scientific societies where they present their data disseminate their data. And that will be in part two of how scientific research is communicated. So let's now take a look at peer review. What actually is peer review? When people hear about peers and judging with peers, what we often think about is the judicial system where a person is judged by a group of their own peers. Well, that's a system that is has a lot of problems because you have professional judges and attorneys where a lot of decisions can be made that aren't necessarily the best decisions. The peer review process for publication is quite different and it's very, very specific and let's deal with that in more detail in this next one. First, it's an evaluation of work by individuals of similar competence to the producer of the work. In other words, the peers are actually other scientists in the same discipline as the scientists that's done the research and their evaluating their work. And they actually have a level of expertise and knowledge that sometimes is as great or may be greater than the actual scientists, such that it is a real peer review process that's actually going on. It's next a process of self regulation by qualified members of a profession is the way you regulate is this science good. We're not going to publish it if it's not good. We're going to police it. It's a mechanism to maintain quality and provide credibility. So the whole area of science must have quality. And the reason it must have qualities because if someone does a scientific discovery and someone else wants to follow up with it and they did bad research, then basically you've wasted potentially large amounts of money and a lot of your time because you followed, if you will, suit with something that was done by someone else that wasn't of quality. It wasn't reliable in the data they hit. So scientists really want to police themselves very, very closely to prevent them from wasting time from following up these other scientists have actually done. So as we look at the next slide, if it's a process that scientists determine is suitable for publication, let's look at the publication publishing in a peer review journal. How does it actually work? The first process of publishing is that the office of mister manuscript. They've done the research, they're excited. They want to let other scientists know about it. And when they submit it to the particular journal, there's an initial in-house assessment where the journal can actually send it back and say, well, this doesn't really fit. It doesn't look like it's complete. Or they can reject it completely and not even let the process continue to the external reviews. But let's say they like it, so they send it to a group of external reviewers. Now these external reviewers are other scientists that usually don't know the particular scientists. Remember, there are thousands of scientists in any given discipline. So that's not a major problem. And these external reviews will then assess the publication. Well, did they set up the experimental protocols correctly? Did they interpret the data correctly? Is it well written to convey the information through the figures in the illustrations really demonstrate what it should look like? And then after the assessment, they sent it back to the editorial board to make a decision. In the editorial board can either accept it for publication, or they can send it out for revision back to the author, or they can reject it completely. Now, this whole process of publishing is quite stringent, if you will. If you publish, for example, in some of the best journals like nature science, you've basically considered considered a real important scientist because very, very few scientists can publish in some of the top journals. Even the middle tier journals is not an easy process to publish in the reviewers are very, very stringent in looking at it. And in fact, in many publications, I've sent out I've had to send it back and forth, at least three times before it could actually accept in publication and do revisions. There are actually thousands of peer review scientific journals. Some of them are hard copy, some of them are online, and some of them both. Most journals are very highly specialized in a particular discipline, such that in biology they're literally hundreds and hundreds of journals just in different disciplines in biology for ranging from cell biology. To environmental sciences, et cetera. Scientific journals are really red, casually. You like people reading magazine casually. The reason for that is most people can't pick up a scientific journal and actually read it and make sense out of it because it is so specific, it's so detailed that by trying to read it casually if you're not, for example, a cell biologist or if you're not for example an entomologist, it really makes no sense at all. It provides details to another researcher can repeat. In other words, in every scientific journal and every scientific paper that's published, you've got to have so much detail that another scientist can actually sit down and reproduce your exact experiment and they should get the same results. If they don't get the same results, that's a problem. Now, the reason that's important is simply because oftentimes you might scientists might want to take off and take the research in another direction based on what you've done. So in this next slide, what we're going to do is we're going to look at how the scientific method that we talked about in an earlier presentation actually aligns itself with peer review journals. In this slide, we look at one side to say a scientific method to others as it says peer review journals. The scientific method, of course, is you have a question. You make an observation and you develop an hypothesis. Well, the first thing in a peer review journal is just a summary or the abstract, which just is an overview of the whole paper. But then in the introduction, is where the observation or the question or the problem is stated. And in the introduction and hypothesis is given. Now, in most peer review journals, the hypothesis is not a simple statement that you could pick out, but it's in the context of the whole introduction. Then the next stage in this method is the experiment. Well, in peer review journals, they have a materials and methods section which talks about how did I actually do the research, the details of selling this experiment up. And the results section, what results did I get? And then finally, in the scientific method, we see the analysis of the data is the hypothesis accepted or rejected. And in the peer review journal, there's this section called discussion where it's talked about or analyzed or evaluated or the creation that was made is described in more detail. This format of the peer review journal being the abstract, the introduction, materials and methods. And then the results and discussion is actually the format that most scientific journals actually follow. Now, there are some deviations to that, but with this particular format, which fits directly into the scientific method, the process of publishing real research is kept more innate, it's very tight method. So consequently, you see that when you pick up magazines or articles on the website, if it's not in that general format, you can sort of know that that's probably not a peer review. So this whole idea of peer review journals. It would be so simple if people understood or read something. And they asked the question, well, what do the peer review journals say about this? What do the real scientists that are doing the research say about this? This would create a scientifically literate society that would deal with many of the issues that we're moving into in our future in a way where politicians can truly make the correct decisions for our future.