While I’d wager that the answer is probably “depends on the journal”, let’s say that a typical Joe, someone not affiliated with any scientific industry, university, or another famous scientist had run a valid experiment, documented it according to the criteria necessary for a valid and reliable falsification test, and submitted it to a journal.
If the journal editors somehow decides to read it and, finding it interesting and scientifically significant, would they publish it? Or would the fact that the guy wasn’t a part of any academic learning center, company, or affiliated with another scientist make his experiment not eligible for publication?
If you want a hypothetical, we can imagine someone who was interested in medicine working in a field that is very small and very niche being aware of a perplexing issue affecting the medical community. Owing to his specialized knowledge in this completely unrelated field, he uses legal methods available to him to run experiments to test a hypothesis, documenting everything as he goes. The results of the experiment, which wouldn’t have occurred to many people as his field is very unique, would be of great interest to the medical community. He submits his experiment to the New England Journal of Medicine. Would they read it and publish from some guy essentially off the street?
Credentials are not what’s keeping the average Joe from publishing. You have to have an idea that’s actually original, do a proper experiment (which may involve equipment that’s not going to be found outside of a specialized lab), analyze it correctly, write up your results in accordance with the conventions of the field, and send it off to the appropriate journal. Any one of those steps is pretty damn tough to pull off unless you have someone who’s done it before to help you along the way.
It could happen in theory but there are practical reasons why it wouldn’t happen often in real-life. Even if you had a group of outstanding Ph.D. holders reincarnated as 8 year olds, they would have a hard time meeting the requirements of most types of studies including data collection methods, ethics committee clearances, having access to the accepted statistical analysis tools, and holding procedures for data. There is a lot of overhead and cost associated with the most mundane studies which the general public is usually shocked by when total costs are given for a study that seems pointless or obvious on the surface. It would be almost impossible for individuals to do human or other mammal experimental (not just free observational) studies and have it accepted into a well-respected journal just because of the red tape involved for example.
Another huge hurdle for a layperson is formatting, even an outstanding finding, in a way that a journal will accept. The formatting and citation requirements tend to be rather Draconian. That could be overcome with an academic sponsor that is willing to rewrite the study to have it published but most would not want to associate themselves with such a thing unless it was a really intriguing and clear-cut finding.
Academics do have to get published and there are thousands of journals out there at every level of prestige. Some Letters journals will take just about anything that is formatted correctly and on topic. Science and Nature are journals that most academics could try for their whole lives and never get to publish their research. There are all types of journals in between. A talented layperson might make it into a Letters journal in some fields but almost never in the field’s more specialized and prestigious journals.
While there are any number of hurdles such an author would have to clear (you & Shagnasty noted many of them), peer-reviewed journals are generally institution/association agnostic - if the science is good/interesting/relevant to the journal in question/etc there should be no issue.
The glamour mags (Science/Nature/Cell and maybe NEJM) may have slightly more questions for your “stateless” author, but if the data reported is flashy enough, they’d take it too.
When my father was still working at UCLA he discovered that a key technique used in statistical significance analysis was flawed; it yielded probabilities greater than 1. He wrote an alternative method and it was categorically rejected by every journal he submitted it to. However, he tried again long after he retired and was finally able to publish it.
I’d say that the two biggest hurdles would be the literature review, and getting the editors’ attention. The first thing you need to do (preferably before you even do the experiment) is to go through all of the previous literature to see what’s already been done on your topic. It’s quite possible that someone else has already done it, or disproven it, or made some other findings that have implications on your results, or whatever. Google Scholar and the various more specialized online databases make this a lot easier than it used to be, but you still can’t really do it properly without subscriptions to the journals. Individual subscriptions to most of them are prohibitively expensive, which means that it’s a practical necessity to have access to an institutional subscription.
The second-biggest problem will be getting the editors to pay any attention to you. While none of the journals actually explicitly require affiliation, there are a lot of crackpots out there, and most things a journal receives will get only a cursory glance before being tossed out. Without affiliation with a university or other research institute, that might not be enough to notice that you really do have something there.
On the formatting point, I’m going to disagree with the other posters and say that it won’t be as big a deal. Yes, it’s a hurdle you need to clear, but journals are up front about what their formatting requirements are, and often even supply templates to make it easier to meet the requirements. Doing so will often require specialized software tools such as TeX, but those are freely available, and there are tutorials online to learn how to use them. It’ll take time to learn, but the resources are all out there if you’re willing.
In case the OP wasn’t entirely hypothetical, what I would recommend is that you find a nearby university and talk to somebody in the relevant department about what you’ve got, and collaborate with them. Or, if that’s too much and you want to get all the credit yourself, then sign up for classes at the university-- That’ll probably at least give you access to the library and the school’s institutional subscriptions, and a .edu e-mail address you can send things out from.
Quite doable to get a paper of some description out there, but very very hard to publish something good and worthwhile.
IME the layman thinks that science is all about knowledge base - e.g. that biophysicist is awesome - she knows what she’s talking about, knows everything about biophysics. She probably does, but it’s only a small part of why she’s awesome.
The real insight comes from knowing what is important in science - a critical skill. Knowing that just because something is really difficult and hasn’t been done before doesn’t make it interesting, or that science is the art of the soluble, or being able to look at the 10 data points in a paper and recognise which one is the driving concept and should be used to anchor the structure of the paper etc etc.
Like anything these skills come with (a great deal of) experience, and it’s next to impossible to appreciate them if you’ve not had the training.
It depends a lot on the journal - there is an incredible range of qualifications needed to get a publication in what at first glance appear to be equivalent journals. In some cases I couldn’t get published in them unless I had a Nobel laureate as a co-author, and in other cases I have editors of the journals phoning me and asking “So…Una, want to submit a paper?”
Some, especially industry-based ones where there is a lot of funding, will even pay the authors for submission; I’ve made as much as $2,000 submitting a paper for publication in a journal, and then they paid for me to fly out to their annual conference and present it. YMMV.
Una, what years were these about? When I was an editor at an industry/EE magazine, during the .dot-boom years, we were tossing around 5k fees like candy. (Our conferences were still only for the hardest-core members, though.)
One possibility, perhaps not applicable for all journals, is for the [del]dilettante[/del], er, amateur, to submit his/her work as a simple letter. Letters, typically being shorter, and occupying a less prestigious place in the journal and in the minds of the editor, may have a lower bar for publication. I will note without citation that the Canadian Medical Journal (CMAJ) seems to often publish letters from non-scientist types (i.e. people with no sets of initials after their names). Same for some of the ‘power’ medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA but less frequently.
I was watching a Mythbusters retrospective and the topic of them getting to shatter a glass with the unamplified human voice came up. By all accounts they were the first people ever to get it on film.
Adam said words to the effect of “…[the results of this episode] have been published in scientific journals.” And yes, he was vague and didn’t name any journals specifically.
I don’t know about that experiment, but Jamie & Adam are listed as co-authors on a paper in Antiquity which reports the results of the episode where they compared flint arrowheads with sharpened wooden arrows: “Making a point: wood- versus stone-tipped projectiles”.
But, relevant to this thread, there are other co-authors from the University of Wyoming.
Beyond TV, which produces MythBusters, is an Australian company. I’m surprised they didn’t list their affiliation as “M5 Industries”, which is Jamie’s company.
Oh, good point; I completely forgot about this. (In my less confident moods, I often think about leaving the academia rat race after graduating, but I wouldn’t want to have to give up entirely the ability to follow the work of the mathematical community, as a hobby if not a career). Dammit, world, hurry up and move to open access for everything!
Were these for profit journals, or ad sponsored publications? No IEEE Computer Society Magazine or transactions pays (transactions want page charges) though Spectrum might. I have solicited papers for special issues I’ve edited, and the job of the program committee for many conferences is to solicit as well as review.
I’d say the answer would be yes, but the author would have to do a really good job in a lot of ways. With no track record, I could see an editor wanting to get another researcher to reproduce the results, because someone with the best of intentions can still fool himself about the outcome of an experiment. If there were people involved, there would be all sorts of human subject issues. The literature survey already mentioned is important. Also, the author would have to match the style (not just the formatting) of papers in that journal, and would have to work very hard to not overclaim. An abstract saying that this is revolutionary work will turn the reviewers right off.
I’ve gotten really bad papers to review, not from people off the street but from people in universities in some other countries with no background in the area. While the editor apologized for sending them to me, they still got reviews. The biggest problem with them was usually that they were solving a problem which had been solved ages ago. But if the papers had been good, they definitely would have been published.
I just want to add that while the OP asks about valid and interesting results, in my experience, interesting is certainly not a requirement, and valid is arguable.
(That there was semi-tongue-in-cheek, if you couldn’t tell)
(This is possibly the weakest post I’ve ever made here)
