Hi, my name is David Schultz. Welcome back to Our Earth, Its Climates, History and Processes. This lecture is about how scientific Journals work. Scientific journals are the way that we scientists communicate between ourselves. The reasons that we do this is first, as we discover and understand the natural world, naturally, we want to communicate these results to each other, and including the public. We want to claim credit for our discoveries, and we want to advance the field. In my case, being a meteorologist, one of the reasons that motivates me is to improve weather forecasts. But there are also other reasons that we publish too. It's a natural outcome of the research. It is what we're expected to do after we've made some discoveries that are worth letting other people know about. Many scientists are actually funded by the taxpayers and as a result, it's our obligation to give back to those taxpayers and report our discoveries to them. Make that information available. It also demonstrates our skill as a scientist. There are some scientists who will do their work and then never write it up for publication. In which case, then, they haven’t done their job. And then finally, it makes our employer happy. By listing our name and our affiliation on our papers, it gives the university some respectability and gets to say, this scientist works at our university. So, if you've never considered the steps in how a scientific journal works, let me introduce you to them. There's three phases. There's obviously a phase where the scientist does the work and writes it up. That's what I call the writing phase. There's the phase called the peer review phase, and I'll talk about that. And then there's the phase after the article survives peer review, and then where the publisher gets it, and I call that the publishing phase. Now, to introduce this idea of the peer review I serve as the chief editor of a journal. It's called Monthly Weather Review and here's a recent copy of this. But, as chief editor, when someone submits a manuscript for possible publication to our journal. I receive it, I determine if it's appropriate. Obviously if it doesn't have much to do with weather then it may not be appropriate for our journal and I may tell the author try another journal. What happens then is I will assign it to one of my editors and I have ten editors that work with me on this journal. And these editors and it could be me that handles the paper. We go out and try and find two or three anonymous reviewers to look at this article. This manuscript that's been submitted. These reviewers then write reviews and this is a written document that in, discusses the strengths, the weaknesses of this article. And it's suitability for our journal. I want these reviewers to tell me, as the editor, whether or not this paper should be published in our journal. So I take these reviews and these recommendations by the two or three reviewers, I make a decision, and I return these reviews to the author with my decision. And. This decision can either be accept the article as it is, revise the article so I'm sending it back to the author to make revisions and then send it back to us or reject, it's simply either not appropriate for our journal or the article is of sufficiently low quality. That it shouldn't be published in our journal. So if it's not rejected and the author has to make revisions, we go back. We get a revised version of this manuscript, and we may send it out for peer review again. And we may go through this loop several times until either. The editor accepts the paper or rejects it from the journal. And as I said, if it gets accepted, then it goes on to the publisher and then gets published. If it gets rejected, then the author has to make a decision whether they would need to do additional work to bring it up to standards, or whether they want to try publishing in a different journal. So, how does this process of peer review work? I want to go into this in a little bit more detail. There's some disadvantages of peer review, in that having to go through this process, slows down getting the work out to other people. You make a discovery, you write it up, you're all excited about it, and you want to convey this information to other people, but it may take. Some months in order for this manuscript to go through peer-review. Peer-review can also be a conservative process. New creative ideas that challenge the status quo may be difficult to get through the peer review process, because people may be resistant. Now that doesn't mean that every paper that has a difficult time getting through the review process is a good paper. But you know, never the less. We have to deal with the fact that new ideas may be resistant. May be re, be. New ideas may be resisted by other people. And then finally we have to recognize that peer review is ultimately a human endeavor. I'm a person, I have flaws and weaknesses as a part of my human condition. The reviewers, the authors, we all are individuals and the ideas of jealousy. And anger and, and so forth are all part of this. So, we have to manage this and be as objective as we can when we handle these papers. But nevertheless you know, we have to do that. Now, there's a lot of advantages to peer review. And, and, you know I, laying down these disadvantages may say, well why do we even have this. But I really want to emphasize that. Most manuscripts, when they go through peer review, are improved. Of the 100 or so papers that I've published, there's only a handful where I can say that I felt that the peer review process was especially harsh on them, and the manuscript, as a result, was not improved. The other benefit of doing peer review is that it's independent verification by other people. Other people have read through my paper and have said, yes, that's a plausible explanation for what he's observed. And it's likely that this work should then go on and be published. And as a result, because its gone through this process of review, it adds credibility and importance to these publications. On my resume, I take special care and pride to list the papers that have undergone peer review separate from those that I've written that have not undergone peer review. Peer review is actually a pretty old concept. It goes back to 1665, where there were two scientific journals that were introduced during that year. And at that time, the peer review process wasn't really used in these journals. The editor looked at the submissions and then determined. himself, whether or not it was acceptable to be published at that time. Now, peer review as a concept goes back quite far. Back to Syria where a bunch of physicians in a local village would get together, look at medical cases that one of them had considered. And then come to a decision about whether or not it had undergone the appropriate treatments. And by doing that, all the doctors learned and were able to improve their treatment. Now. Editors, as I said, used to handle the decisions themselves, usually by themselves. But after World War II, the modern concept of peer review where we would send out the manuscripts to other people came into play. And that's essentially how modern peer review has developed. One question that you may be asking is well why can't you just publish everything else that comes in? Why do we have to have this peer review process? I already implicated that peer review improves the submissions to journals that we get. But nevertheless why can't journals just publish everything? Why can't people just put stuff out on the internet? They do it now, why can't we just collect that information and publish it? Well the problem is that if we were to publish everything we get then early career scientists. Students who were looking through the literature would have a much harder time determining what good science was from bad science. And their many bad science papers that we get over time. So, I think it's important then that we have this peer review process to weed out the low-quality papers, only publish papers that we think have passed minimal standards and thus. Give the public confidence that at least a few other people have looked at this paper and have determined that it is good enough for publication. So, to summarize this lecture I talked about how we scientists communicate with one another, and also to the general public now that many of these journals are available online. We talked a little bit about the peer-review process, and the importance that it serves to eliminate low-quality publications low-quality articles, and only show the very best that we have. And, then, finally I discussed why we have this peer review process, and why it's important. So, look forward to seeing you in the next lecture. Thanks.
