Jon Turney in London
NOBODY knows exactly how many scientific journals there are today, but everybody knows which ones really matter. Tens of thousands of obscure titles pour from the world’s presses, but scientists who want to be noticed vie for space in the two heavyweight weeklies – Nature (from Britain) and Science (from the United States). Their medical colleagues opt for The Lancet.
These publications get noticed because they are the only ones mainstream news journalists pay attention to. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: if it is important, Dr Dazzle’s latest finding will be in Science or Nature. If it is in Nature or Science, it will be treated as important.
The custom suits all parties. A journal like Nature, ironically founded around 125 years ago as a popular organ, now publishes work as esoteric as any of its less famous rivals. Nature survives (and secures lucrative advertising) by maintaining its prestige: and it does that by making sure that scientists who publish in its pages get lots of attention. Well, some of them anyway.
No one expects newshounds to plough through the actual papers, so Nature, like the others, sends out a press release highlighting the 10 or so sexiest stories of the week.
And the journalists? For them, the blue- chip journals make life, well, much easier. As British science news writers told media researcher Anders Hansen, of Leicester University, if it is in Nature, it does not need checking. The authority of the journal is a guarantee that this is as reliable as science gets.
This is why the key journals have been at the heart of every major scientific controversy of the last 20 years. From Aids to cloning, the key findings appear first in one of the major journals. They are science’s gateway to the wider world.
The torrent of science which eager researchers are trying to force through this narrow funnel creates tensions between the way these journals relate to their three very different audiences – the scientists, the journalists and, at one remove, the public. The big journals want research to be eye-catching as well as unimpeachable. And the two do not go together as often as they would have us believe.
Sometimes, run-of-the-mill work gets attention it scarcely deserves. The two most cited papers on biological determinants of male homosexuality come from different areas of research – neuroanatomy and genetics. Both were based on extremely slender data, both were published with much fanfare in Science, and both have proved very hard to replicate.
At one level, none of the outcomes matters to the journal, as long as its credibility remains intact and it stays in the public eye. But how well do these journals manage the trickier cases, especially at a time when public trust in scientists appears to be on the wane? And how do press release embargoes avoid problems with commercial interests, when many new results, especially in biomedical research, are going to send a company’s share prices up or down?
Jon Turney teaches science communication at University College, London
—Omitted from last week’s edition—