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Part Two
Doing Science
Chapter 4
The Nuts and Bolts
This chapter describes how scientists know whether they can trust published results, how the peer-review system works, and where scientists get funding for their research.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
In 2018, Susan Bourne, the interim dean of science at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and I were talking about science journals. The scientific paper is the primary mechanism for both broadcasting one’s own scientific results and determining what research has been done by others and how they did it. It is also a measurement used to assess a scientist’s worth, whether for funding, tenure, promotion, or getting a job. I like how Susan succinctly summed up her thoughts on the scientific publishing process and probably those of most other scientists: “The system is completely crazy. The taxpayer funds the research, the scientists do the research, write it up for free, do all the editing, all the peer reviewing—the publisher gets everything for free. And then the taxpayer has to pay for us to get access to it again.”
Prior to the 1600s, scientists privately communicated their findings and ideas in letters, gave public lectures, and wrote books once the experiments were all done and their ideas and theories had matured. There was no way of publishing increments of one’s research. When the advent of scientific journals allowed scientists to publish chunks of their work, “scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.”[1] At first the papers were shorter, less formal, and more readable than they are today. As the research became more specialized, papers became longer and contained more jargon.
I sometimes think of scientific papers as puzzle pieces. Nature is full of intriguing puzzles for researchers to solve. The jigsaw pieces don’t come in a box, with the number of pieces listed and a picture of the solution on the lid. To solve any of nature’s puzzles, researchers need to find the pieces, then try to put them in the correct place. Some puzzles are much more important than others, and within the puzzles themselves some jigsaw pieces are more central than others. Scientific research is all about finding the pieces, putting them together, and trying to extrapolate to determine the big picture even when some pieces are still missing. Some puzzles lead to new understandings, others form the basis of new theories, and yet others result in new techniques. When a puzzle reaches a certain stage, it becomes easier and easier to put in the pieces; the research accelerates. The breakthrough occurs when the pictures on the puzzle become visible, when a central piece is placed that allows whole new areas to emerge. An important puzzle can lead to the start of many other new puzzles.[2]
Each year about 1.8 million papers are published in roughly 2,800 journals.[3] The journals are not all equal. Science, Nature, and Cell are the most prestigious ones;
