I would have to come down on the side of publication, I just don’t see how you can make any sort of rules about the type of work that can be published in journals without rendering the whole exercise pointless. Similarly reputable journals should be free to turn the papers away.
Also we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the number of suspect or badly considered papers that already make it into the literature (I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to understand why an author had used a paticular method only to come to the conclusion he had just clumsily copied and pasted a huge chunk of his methods section from a completely different study).
I am a little worried about the people out there who seem to think if something that they want to believe in is supported by any published paper it is true (and now they have proof ) but maybe this sort of thing will make people think twice about this assumption and I think on the balance that this would probably be a good thing.
Scientific journals ARE allowed to publish just about anything. But subject to the caveat that they have to make it through the peer review process and are quality work. Creation science generally isn’t, and therein lies the reason why it doesn’t get published.
The article in question actually wasn’t put in via the normal process regardless, which was the subject of some grumbling (it was slipped in right before Sternberg’s term at the journal was up, without a consult with any of the other editors). It also wasn’t a primary research article: it was a lit review (collecting bits from other research to make a case rather than presenting any new or primary research to support ones claims).
It should also be noted that it seems like a lot of Sternberg’s claims to the right-wing media about the brouhaha were, shall we say, not entirely accurate: the scare quotes in the worldnet daily article, for instance, don’t seem to have have actually been said by anyone, let alone Coddington. And what the article doesn’t say is that Sternberg was an unpaid research associate with access to the Smithsonian collections, and even after the controversy, he still is. Contrary to all the hand waving trying to invent a crackdown or retribution, nothing happened to him. His office move happened before the article was even in play, and affected many associates, not just Sternberg. In short, this incident was played out as a martyrdom drama, perhaps deliberately.
There is thus every reason to think that, while the article passed some semblance of the peer review process (though, note the very careful parsing Sternberg does about who the reviewers were and might have been), it did so under the special sheparding of Sternberg in what would have been a bizarre move even if the subject of the paper was not controversial at all.
I think it’s pretty hard to aruge that the paper’s scientific quality was high and that this was just business as usual. Unfortunately for ID, even though it made it into the journal (all problems with which journal and how aside) is that it makes no positive case for ID. If all the ID movement really wanted were articles critical of this or that aspect of evolutionary theory, there are thousands of such articles. That is the normal course of science. They just generally aren’t so sloppy and peppered with plugs for a political cause.
Quality and peer review do NOT necessarily go hand in hand. If you want to publish in Science or Nature, then you damn well better have your "t"s crossed and your "i"s dotted and you better not make any claim that you can’t back up with at least three experiments. I just hate the idea that if this is in fact a crap study, that it still somehow provides ammunition of “Look, ID is accepted science because it was published!”
I’ve never heard of this journal, and I’d guess that their “peer review” is pretty, well, crappy. There are thousands of journals, and many of them aren’t much better than vanity press. Hell, I have a few publications that I’d prefer to leave off my CV…
That being said, if someone provides good evidence of ID through experimentation (which I can’t imagine how), then not only should it be published, but it absolutely WOULD be published. It would be published in a top, top, top journal. This idea that scientists are supressing good evidence is total bullshit. Scientists are downplaying the idea that all evidence is equal. Shitty data does not turn a hypothesis into a theory, and ID requires extraordinary evidence.
“Sternberg was also a signatory of the Discovery Institute’s “100 Scientists Who Doubt Darwinism” statement.”
hmmm I seem to remember a similar story from a few years ago…oh yeah, 100 german scientists against relativity or something along those lines…Einsteins response went something like this “if my theory of relativity were wrong it would only take 1 scientist to prove it”
I loaned the book to a friend or I would look up the exact quote, its pretty funny since it was held in a theater and Einstein was sitting in the audience eatting popcorn and laughing at them.
Do you know if its normal not to release the names of the reviewers? (I’m pretty ignorant of the process myself).
Also, do you agree with tomndebb that it’s unusual for there to be 50 objections to a paper? Doesn’t that belie claims of insufficient reveiw?
And where do you think it would be appropriate to publish in, if not that in that journal? I kind of doubt there are any creationist journals that would are considered scientific. Maybe I’m wrong, but taxonomic and systematic studies seem to be about the closest thing you’ll find to a wholistic analysis of evolutionary biology.
For those who are interested, I found the article online here (though taken out of the context of the journal). It doesn’t directly provide any evidence, but then I’m not sure one would expect it to given the space provided. More specifics would presumably come out in letters to the editor and the author’s responses.
Overall, it doesn’t seem to be the best written paper. But, especially given enigmatic’s comment on shoddily written papers already in circulation, I still don’t see how this rises to the level that it never should have been published.
Since the Washington Post requires registration and some posters may not have seen it, here are the relevant passages regarding Sternberg’s beliefs and the pre-publication review of the article:
(McVay is the spokesman for the U.S. Office of Special Counsel which investigated claims of badgering. He is a political appointee by the current administration who was looking into charges that are irrelevant given that Mr. Sternberg is not employed and so cannot be an employee victim of the sort that the OoSP was established to prevent. McVay also acknowledged that his comments were based on a lack of information from the Smithsonian).
Well, McVay made it sound as though he would have given the Smithsonian a better hearing if they had “bothered” to respond to him. Of course, then we immediately get into the issues of an outside government snoop poking around in areas that are not even within his jurisdiction and whether the Smithsonian either withheld information because it was inappropriate to divulge some information to unauthorized persons or whether the Smithsonian was either “dismissing” the legitimate (if out of jurisdiction) questions of a government agent or were “covering up” for bad actions. I doubt that we can get an unbiased version of this story at this point.
And Bryan College just happens to be a small Conservative Christian College (named after William Jennings Bryan) in Dayton, Tennessee, home of the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” In fact, the school was founded in the very school where Scopes taught.
Scientific journals should be able to publish what they choose to publish. Their reputations rest on how soundly they stick to scientific principles and not personal agenda.
A journal would never release the name of a reviewer under normal circumstances. Many reviewers, at least in my field, sign their reviews, but this is for the benefit of the author of the article - even in this case their names would not be released to outsiders.
If there were actually 50 objections to the paper by the reviewers, it either should not have been published, or the editor should have required the author to refute each and every one of the objections either in the paper or to his satisfaction. It would not be a matter of insufficient review, but of the editor not doing a proper job in seeing that the objections of the reviewers were satisfactorially answered.
As they indicate in their statement, this journal would never normally have published an article of this kind.
If the article had actually been any good and scientifically valid, it could have been in a major journal such as Science or Nature, or a more specialized journal like* Evolution*, or many many journals of either general interest, or dealing with evolution or paleontology. Taxonomic and systematic studies are normally very narrowly focused and would not address large-scale themes like this one did.
It seems to me that the actual review process was unethically and surreptitiously subverted by the editor. This was gross malfeasance of his responsibility. For that reason, if nothing else, it should not have been published.
To follow up, there are a number of ways that the editor could have subverted the review process. For example, he could have deliberately sent it to reviewers that he knew might be favorably inclined to seeing the article published, instead of sending it to those reviewers who were most qualified in that particular field of paleontology. Just because an article has been reviewed doesn’t mean it has been competently reviewed.
Oh I understood what McVay was saing. However, if you lack information because someone didn’t answer a question and you are entitiled to an answer the proper course to is enforce your entitlement and get the answer, then make statements. If you are not entitiled to an answer then it’s bad form for an investigator to speculatr based on the lack of an answer. Well, now maybe that doesn’t apply to Bill O’Reilly but I thinks it’s generally true.
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington is a small but quite legitimate journal with a 120-year history. You have to be a member of the Society to publish in it, but as far as I can tell that only requires payment of a membership fee. It generally carries a lot of publications by Smithsonian scientists, especially those based at the National Museum of Natural History. As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with its normal review process (aside from this recent glitch) and the journal is well enough respected in its field. The associate editors whose names I recognize are respected scientists. But really, nearly all of its articles just consist of dry species descriptions and articles on classification, which are generally non-controversial. It is not exactly a “high-impact” journal, being mostly read by specialists. I am having an article published in its sister publication, Bulletin of the Biological Society of Washington later this year.
Is it one of these journals, like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that allows subversion of the peer review if you have a membered sponsor simply submit an article?
If you’re having articles published, I don’t think that I have to tell you that peer review is far from perfect. Get the right reviewers, which you can even request a lot of the time, and you can get any crappy article published. I’m just trying to make the point that simply because something was peer reviewed does not make it accurate good (or even decent) science. Hell, I was peer reviewing things as a second year graduate student which I had no business reviewing because of a lazy mentor who simply handed his articles to his grad students to review. This occurs very often.
Illogical. Darwin believed in God. Evolution is just a theory explaining how the universe works. It doesn’t pretend to explain the creation of the universe. If God is omnipotent, He could create a universe where evolution occurs.
Being a member doesn’t seem to give any special status, so I rather doubt it. Membership apparently requires nothing more than paying the dues to join, and you have to be a member to even submit an article.
Oh, I agree with you 100% on that issue. I reall seeing an article last year in the house journal of a major museum in which the conclusions seemed quite shaky, but since the second author was a senior staff scientist at the museum I suspect it got some rather lenient treatment from the editor.
Re the OP, a question like “Should scientific journals be allowed to publish ‘creation science’?” is rather like asking “Should engineering journals be allowed to publish literary criticism?” Despite the name, “creation science” is not science, and neither is intelligent design. What a journal publishes is a matter of the journal’s policy, and they are free to publish whatever they choose. If a journal decided to publish articles on non-scientific subjects, there is nothing at all to stop them, but they would no longer qualify as a scientific journal. So the question in the OP is rather meaningless as phrased.
Even within a particular scientific field, most professional journals are quite specialized. If I were to send an article about Panama birds to a journal on African Birds, the editor would reject without even sending it out for review, no matter what its quality. If I were to send an article that consists of minor distributional notes to a major ornithological journal, they will reject it because they don’t publish such narrow articles. I would, however, be able to publish it in a journal that deals with local distributional studies. If I were to send a major review of the evolutionary history of birds to a minor regional journal that deals with distributional notes - well, that would be ridiculous, and the editor would think I was crazy.
Given the general subject matter treated by PBSW, there is no question that a responsible editor would have rejected the article in question without ever even sending it out for review, no matter what its quality. The fact that the article was even sent out for review, especially outside the normal channels (since it didn’t involve the participation of an associate editor), indicates the editor was subverting the journal’s own policy.
That is more or less how it works in physics…The reviews are anonymous. I think the idea of signing reviews is very rare…I have only seen one case of it, when the reviewer said that it would be obvious to the author who the reviewer was anyway so he was waiving his confidentiality and signed the review.
I believe in social science fields, there is often anonimity both ways…i.e., the reviewers aren’t told who the author is either. (And, I believe authors are even told to avoid statements that directly give it away…e.g., by referring to “my previous work” with footnotes to previous papers.)
The policy in Physical Review is that authors can request this double-blind approach, but a PR editor I sat next to on a flight to a physics meeting told me that it is very rare for authors to do so and seems to occur with papers that don’t end up meeting the editorial standards by a long-shot anyway. (He also told me of a funny case where the author asked for such a double-blind review but had in the first sentence of the paper, “In my previous work…” with footnotes to several of his other papers.)
I would disagree slightly here. I.e., I think it is at the discretion of the reviewer. For Physical Review, it amounts to checking different boxes that say things such as “Reconsider after the authors have responded to my revisions” or “Publish after the authors have responded to my revisions; I do not need to see the paper again” or “Publish after the authors have considered my optional suggestions.” In other words, there are 3 categories:
(1) My objections are serious enough that the paper must be re-reviewed by me or someone else after the authors have responded to the suggested revisions.
(2) My objections are serious enough that I think the authors must address them but not serious enough so that I need to see the paper again…I’ll leave it to the editor to judge whether they have been adequately addressed.
(3) My objections are minor enough…really more like comments…that I am basically leaving it at the author’s discretion how they should be responded to.
I do agree though that to raise 50 objections but then say that the paper should be published seems rather bizarre, unless most of the objections were very minor. And, I know from personal experience that Physical Review tends to err on the side of sometimes sending papers back to the reviewers to make sure the revisions are acceptable even if the reviewer checked the box that essentially says that they don’t need to see it again.