Flawed Method At The Heart Of Scientific Communication

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles -A flawed method at the heart of scientific communication The publication of scientific work lies at the core of scientific communication [1]. Scientists communicate their new research or studies to their audience by publishing their work in scholarly journals and books. Moreover, students of science and other disciplines that are not from the area of expertise and that are unfamiliar with the given topic must be able to trust in the credibility of articles published in journals and books. A common process that controls the high quality of scientific publication is called ‘peer review’, which ensures that the published work has met the specific standards of a given discipline, a process that usually begins†¦show more content†¦A survey conducted by Ware showed that a majority of authors (91%) believed that peer review led to significant improvements in their last published paper [13]. More than half of them agreed that the peer review effectively identified weaknesses and flaws in their manuscript (i.e. scientific errors, language and poor reference) [13]. Peer-reviewed journal articles are credible be cause experts deem the information therein to be error free and unlikely to be wrong. For example, in July 2012, a team of scientists from European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced a discovery of a particle matching the property of Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of physics [14*]. Initially, CERN was unsure whether the newly discovered particle is actually the Higgs boson, probably because the model physics only has one undiscovered particle remaining [15]. After CERN’s announcement, two papers describing their finding were submitted to a journal Physics Letters B. In September 2012, both papers passed peer review and are accepted as being actual science. Condliffe said in his article that now the researchers are confident in their findings and it would be a rare chance for this new discovery to be wrong [16]. This example shows that peer review reduces the uncertainty involved in scientific work. Although all the science contains uncertainty and how to communicate such uncertainty is always the biggest problem for scientists [19], peer