Peer reviewed creationism
So for my first post for ages, I’m going to link direct to someone else’s post - a great review of the brand new publication International Journal of Creation Research. I quote from 6_bleen_7’s post:
But there is something more sinister at work here, and it all hinges on one hyphenated word in the description of this farcical publication: “IJCR is a professional peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary scientific research that presents evidence for recent creation within a biblical framework”.
It’s a really good post, definitely worth reading, and shows just how far the creationism movement is going to undermine the scientific method. In this case, it’s the attack on “peer review” - the idea that most scientific publications are subjected to review and argument by other scientists, with knowledge of your area, before seeing the light of day. This means that, reading the article, you can be fairly sure that it adheres to a minimum standard of scientific quality. It might be wrong, but not by intent or through stupid mistakes.
So, for instance, despite many claims of the power of biomagnetic healing, there are no peer reviewed papers showing any health benefits of permanent magnets. Simiarly, there are no peer reviewed papers showing any “evidence” for creationism, or even providing good interpretions for fossils, carbon dating, etc. That’s not because no science journals will publish creationist ideas - it’s because there’s no evidence for them.
So, what else would you do, but start your own “peer reviewed” journal and publish all of your supposed theories in that? Then you’re just as legitimate as any scientist.
The solution is too complicated, unfortunately, and that’s the idea of impact factor - the journal world equivalent of Google’s PageRank technology. Journals are rated according to how often their articles are cited by other articles (the equivalent of web links). And this is a pretty simple picture. One could imagine that Google’s Google Scholar would use a more sophisticated version, weighting each article’s contribution by how much it is cited - just like Google does with regular web searches. I expect you’d find that such algorithms would give pretty poor weighting to a journal never cited by anything but itself. (Of course, people would have to resist the urge to write things like “The ridiculous article by Smith (2007) says that…”)
But, how do you explain all that to a newspaper reporter, tossing up the scientific merits of evolution vs creationism?