Today, I focus on the use and abuse of the peer-reviewed literature to produce tactical science which I define as:
Publications — often targeted for the peer reviewed literature — designed and constructed to serve extra-scientific ends, typically efforts to shape public opinion, influence politics, or serve legal action.
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What are we to do about tactical science? I have a few suggestions:
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- First, we should all recognize that peer review provides a minimal standard of review. It certainly does not provide a demarcation between good and bad science. There is plenty of very good science not in peer-reviewed journals and plenty of dreck in peer-reviewed journals — and this has always been the case, well beyond issues of tactical science.
- [A] peer-reviewed publication represents just one, arguably early, step in evaluating scientific claims. This lesson is one that has motivated interest in recent years in [the] replication and reproduction of scientific analyses.
- The scientific community needs to do a much better job ensuring that the institutions of science — including but not limited to journals — are simply doing their jobs.
- For journalists and the broader public, it is important to understand that peer review does not organically produce truth and that the same forces that shape public debates over scientific claims also show up in research and publishing. It’s complicated, that is just a fact.
