OT: For those with blind faith in peer reviews

[Tim Streater]

A Leading Article from The Times of yesterday (9/9/23) relates to a piece also in yesterday's Times, by Dr Brown in which he describes how he has to cherry-pick what he talks about in order to get published. Here's the Times view:

Title: Climate Changes Subhead: Contributors to top scientific journals are skewing results to satisfy editors' biases

The physicist Alan Sokal pulled off one of the most damning scholarly hoaxes of recent decades when, in 1996, he persuaded a literary journal to accept a wilfully nonsensical paper. The Sokal Affair, as it became known, was designed to expose the lax standards in the less rigorous publications where research passed muster so long as it "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".

It might be hoped that climate science is immune to such groupthink. But in our weekend essay, Patrick Brown, a former academic, argues persuasively that it isn't. His research into Californian wildfires was published last week in Nature, one of the most renowned scientific journals. To ensure that it was accepted, however, required "customising the research" so as to render it "compatible with the confirmation bias of the editors".

Influential journals, Dr Brown alleges, are unwilling to consider research which downplays the scale of climate change or which emphasises the viability of adaptive measures as an alternative to emissions reductions. In the competitive world of academia, where landing papers in leading publications determines one's career prospects, the perception of bias on the part of the editors can fundamentally warp the direction of research.

There is no suggestion that Dr brown's paper contained outright falsehoods. The bias is subtler than that. Instead, he isolated climate change as the sole variable in explaining the risk of Californian wildfires, a misleading focus given that 80% of wildfires in America are started by humans. According to Brown, other strategies are often used to inflate the scale of climate change, yielding eye-popping statistics.

These tactics lead to work that is deceptive and neglects promising lines of inquiry for fear of challenging consensus. Such incuriosity is the hallmark of bad science and timid politics.

[Spike]

Not quite the same, but…

Many years ago my colleague and I worked for some time under a scientist that was determined to get his FRS.

He once asked me to undertake a project, and wanted to know how I was going to approach the issue. I came up with a scheme, but the discussion of the data reduction part took an hour of his time, because I wasn’t going to use a control to test the effects against and he simply couldn’t see why. My assurances and explanations that the internal statistics would show up what we were looking for were a mystery to him. In the end he threw down his pen and in an exasperated voice said to go ahead. I did so, and when I showed him the results he was astonished; it showed exactly what was going on.

Moving on a few years, and the FRS-bound chap had left for another organisation. My colleague came to me to say he’d done some research and written a draft paper that he wanted to submit to a prestigious journal. The problem was that we strongly suspected the peer reviewer for the paper would be the FRS-bound chap, and although such things were supposedly secret, the field was quite a narrow one. To ensure there was no issue with his findings, my colleague asked me to work up the statistics, knowing that the FRS-bound chap would guess the source of this part of the paper and wouldn’t query the results. It worked like a charm, and the paper was duly published. Later it transpired our surmise about the identity of the peer-reviewer was correct…

The publication of scientific papers involves all sorts of game playing…

[The Natural Philosopher]

That story also appeared in the DE and the Telegraph...

It expressed what all academics have known for a decade. If you want funding, or publication, stick 'climate change', 'renewable energy', or 'carbon capture' in the outline.

If you want to be consigned to the outer darkness and lose your job and your pensions, challenge the 'consensus narrative'...

[Brian Gaff]

There have been a lot of articles about the problem of getting funding relying on the subject you cover. I don't have an answer, but you really cannot make a sweeping statement that climate change is not real from a witch hunt mentality. You need to have reproducible results from good data. That means people doing the work rather than commenting from the hip according to their personal bias. Humans have a very bad track record of dealing with long term issues They kick them into the long grass. Take a look at what we have done with our rubbish in space and on the moon. Brian

[Tim Streater]

What Chummy had to say in his longish article was that:

1) He learnt quickly as a brand new university Lecturer that you have to tailor your submitted papers to suit, if you want your career to progress. 2) He learnt not to add any research into ways of mitigating climate change, such as adapting agriculture, or other. Such would be most unwelcome to the reviewers who are after papers that big up the catastrophe implications. Their view is that mitigation just dilutes the "message", even if the mitigations work. 3) He learnt to exclude other valid reasons for issues, such as for why there are more Californian wildfires. Mitigations here (e.g. better forest and undergrowth management), too, would be particularly unwelcome.

IOW, the reviewers are acting as policy drivers (by protecting and enhancing the "message"). This of course is not their job. Their job is to publish the facts, and let actual policymakers decide what to make of it.

Still there's nothing actually new in such bias. See

and read the section entitled "Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology".