Source: BBC2
URL: N/A
Date: 25/09/2013
Event: Science Britannica Pt 2 [excerpt]: Brian Cox on peer review
Credit: BBC2
People:
Brian Cox: Now obviously there's no point in finding interesting things out about the natural world and keeping them to yourself, not telling anyone. There's much more to publishing than that. This is an edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1861, and one of the papers here, by John Tyndall, is one of the first pieces of research on what we now call the greenhouse effect, the way that different gases absorb heat. There is table after table of results.
But he also describes precisely how he got those results. And there's a beautiful diagram of his apparatus. And this is there so that anyone else reading this paper, if they're sceptical about the results - or even if they just want to check them - can re-build the apparatus and re-do the experiments and check that Tyndall didn't make any mistakes.
So these results are not a matter of opinion. They're here, they can be checked by other scientists, they can be verified. So this is how scientific knowledge progresses. Publishing is the reason why science gets to our best view of the way that nature works.
Since the Philosophical Transactions emerged, in 1665, thousands of journals have been published on every aspect of science. Scientific journals have flourished in this way, because they can be trusted. What's printed in them is as close to a statement of fact as you can hope for. And we can trust in that science, thanks to a unique, British-born system of self-regulation that lies at its heart - peer review.
Dr. Philip Campbell is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Nature. And peer review is central to its reputation, as one of the greatest journals in the world. [To Dr. Philip Campbell]: Could you run through the peer review process and describe exactly how that works?
Philip Campbell: So peer review is an attempt by colleagues, as it were, of the authors - their peers - to see whether what these authors have produced looks valid. He or she will look at that and really rip it to shreds, digging into the data and then coming back to us and saying "I've really have looked at this stuff and it really has stood up to what I thought". Or they'll say it doesn't.
Brian Cox: So, how would you assess the effectiveness of the peer review process, just objectively? I mean, does it do what we all want it to do, which is to be absolutely objective and a pure assessment of where our scientific knowledge is?
Philip Campbell: So, it's full of little holes, which is how I see it. I think there are all sorts of ways in which bad papers can slip through. It's not perfect, and I'm sure that there are degrees of bias. But I would feel a lot more worried if we were retracting lots of our papers. Actually we retract very few of our papers, and I believe that that's actually because what we publish is, by and large, robust. I really cannot think of a more critically-minded group of people than scientists.
Brian Cox: Peer review is not the only service provided by scientific publishing. Because the journals are one of the key voices of the scientific community, providing a forum for continued debate. This continuous interrogation by the scientific community helps sort the good science from the bad. Gradually this gives way to a consensus, with scientists agreeing on the latest findings and their meaning.
Philip Campbell: No paper is the end of the story. So, even though it's got the Nature name on it, from my point of view, I know that it's only when it's out there and people have really tested it and tried to build on it that you really know whether it's true.
Brian Cox: Global warming is a good example. Now, there's an overwhelming scientific consensus that carbon dioxide, and other emissions into the atmosphere, is changing the climate, warming the world. So how did that consensus develop?
Philip Campbell: So, the climate system is enormously complex and I don't think there is any single paper that could ever show, one way or another, that climate warming, because of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, is occurring. So it's only over a lot of time, and a lot of cumulative evidence and a lot of critical scrutiny, that you end up convinced that something's really happening. I would so love to show that climate change isn't happening in a way that I do actually believe threatens, you know, my grandchildren's future. But it's so unfortunate, if you like, that we don't seem to be getting papers that show that it's wrong.
Brian Cox: Peer review is an attempt to introduce an additional level of rigour to the process of discovery, allowing us to distinguish between tested hypotheses and speculation. The difference between a book and a scientific journal is that in a book you're reading an author's opinion. Nobody else in the world may agree with the contents of this book [Brian Cox is holding a copy of Self Power by Deepak Chopra] and you wouldn't know - it's a statement of opinion. Whereas a scientific journal has been through some level of checking - experts in the field have looked at it and found that it's not obviously wrong. So a scientific peer-reviewed journal is, in a sense, a snapshot of our best view of the world on a particular subject at any given time.