Scientists Are Bad At Identifying Important Science, Study Finds
Scientific Papers Ryan Snook Maybe you shouldn't put too much stock in what four out of five dentists say? Scientists, even experts in the same field, don't agree on which research studies are the most important, a new study (of course) found. On one hand, this sounds obvious—experts don't agree. On the other hand, it suggests even scientists can't pinpoint what great science is. The new study also found scientists are unduly influenced by the prestige of the journal in which a paper is published. "It's very difficult to assess merit. We're all sort of stumbling around in a fog," Adam Eyre-Walker, a biologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K., tells Popular Science. Eyre-Walker and a colleague, Nina Stoletzki, examined more than 6,000 published papers that experts reviewed after publication. The papers came from two databases. One is that...