Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Search
On Science Journals and “Wrong” Papers
November 6th, 2008
The other day I linked to this story from the Economist called “Publish and Be Wrong.” They were making the criticism that scientists may be overselling their results to get into the most prestigious journals, and hence the top journals were more likely to be publishing “wrong” results.
Well, I have been thinking more about this and have some criticisms of the article. Sorry. I know criticizing economists can be like kicking a dead horse, but…sometimes you just feel the urge to rear back and kick the hell out of the thing.
Most science publications are called “journals.” I see papers published in them as the official public version of the research journal of mankind. It is totally normal in a journal to get excited about preliminary results, to look at small samples before examining larger data sets, and to engage in some informed speculation to help motivate future work.
A paper is wrong, and only wrong, when mistakes are made.
A spurious correlation is not a mistake. A speculation that turns out to be wrong after additional observations or experiments is not a mistake. Sometimes these things turn out to be right, and fast and high-profile publication directs people to work on them right away and check them out.
In astronomy, we have a journal exactly for this: Astrophysical Journal Letters. Short papers, fast publication, more timely, may be more speculative:
Timeliness — A Letter should have a significant immediate impact on the research of a number of other investigators or be of special current interest in astrophysics. Permanent, long-range value is less essential. A Letter can be more speculative and less rigorous than an article for Part 1 but should meet the same high standard of quality.
Related to this post is the sloppy nomenclature of writers talking about “failed” experiments. Experiments test ideas, giving a result in support of, or contradictory to, a hypothesis or theory. An experiment is only a failure when it doesn’t provide a test. Science is about learning things, not confirming things. Engineering is about making things work. Don’t confuse the two.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I wanted to add that ApJ Letters, as it is called, is a prestigious place to publish. Science and Nature, as discussed in the Economist article, also, and those magazines also require very brief papers. New, exciting, and timely results don’t always stand up to scrutiny, and that’s ok. We still want to have them visible rapidly, yes?