Sh!t Sc!ence

At Sh!t Sc!ence, we’ve been trying to provide evidence that the scientific method that is in place is an effective filter, and that as such, there is no such thing as ‘shit science’. But as it is the end of the year, and you might be going off to glorious academic careers, here are a few things you should know to be able to judge a scientific paper critically.

Scientists need to publish to survive. A scientist’s worth is evaluated depending on the number, or the ‘quality’ of articles that he or she publishes, and that influences who the funding bodies are going to chose to fund.

While scientists, on average, work on a paper for publish for four years, their work is condensed in about 5000 words. That means that scientists will have a tendency to only present the most convincing arguments to support their story, and can be inclined not to publish the experiments that haven’t worked.

Peer-review is a fantastic and necessary process. However, because you have to ask people that are in the field to comment on the science, and because a specific field in science can be very narrow, you often ask people’s competitors to judge the work, and it has been shown that reviewers sabotage their competitors’ work to make their research publish before their competitors’.

Journals are attributed an ‘impact factor’ which is determined according to how many people read the content of the journal. The higher the impact factor, the more prestigious the journal is thought to be, and the more scientists will want to submit their articles to that journal. However, to maintain that traffic to their journal, editors might be tempted to reject a perfectly good article on the basis that it is not ‘cutting-edge’ or trendy enough.

It is a system put in place by humans and limited by human envy. However, it is the best system that we have, and all in all, it ensures a high level of integrity within the scientific community.

I know that during this past year, together we embarked on a journey that looked at the lighter side of science, packed with sarcasm and a questionable sense of humour.

But I honestly hope as this final term draws to the end, that you have been convinced that all science is helpful, even though it is a human-driven process, and as such has its pitfalls.

So whether you’re reading about the wobble of obese penguins, the painfully difficult Mario Bros stages, or the ability of fish to hate, don’t raise your eyebrows, don’t shake your head. Instead marvel at how it expanded our repository of knowledge.