Maintaining confidence in the reporting of scientific outputs
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Science and Medical Education, Science Policy
- Keywords
- Preprints, Peer review, science communication, Open science, science journalism, academic publishing
- Copyright
- © 2018 Sarabipour et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Maintaining confidence in the reporting of scientific outputs. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27098v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27098v1
Abstract
The timely and accurate dissemination of scientific discoveries is of utmost importance so that scientific knowledge can be advanced and applied to benefit the public. Scientists communicate amongst themselves at conferences, via journal articles, and, increasingly in the life sciences, in preprint manuscripts which have not been subject to peer review. Journalists translate new research into a language the public can understand, relying on both work presented in scientific forums and interviews with experts. Critically, scientists and journalists both share the ethical principle that publications should be rigorously sourced and fact-checked, with errors subject to publicized corrections. Here we respond to concerns raised about the impact of reporting on results that have not passed through peer review, calling for improved dialogue between scientists and journalists to maintain public trust in research and arguing that imposing limits is against the public interest.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.