Also: how do you identify a work as peer reviewed?
If its peer reviewed then it should go through the experimental setup, the data and accompanying math. They can be evaluated by anyone with enough basic knowledge with math usually being the limiting factor. For example there was this study about animal intelligence that the criteria was if they could recognize themselves in a mirror. Birds and dolphins made the cut but not dogs. My complaint was it was biased to animals where vision was their more primary sense. Now im not an expert in the field but I can still find fault in that way.
Though, that’s not peer review. What you’re describing is reproducibility. And that’s the very minimum to qualify as science. If it doesn’t describe the experiment well enough so an expert can follow it… It’s not even proper science.
Peer review means, several expert in that domain already took some time to go through it and point out flaws, comment on the methodology and gave a recommendation to either publish it or fix mistakes. It’s not the ability to do it, but that it actually already happened. And it has to be other researchers from the same field.
And there is even another possible step after that, if an independent other research group decides to reproduce the experiment and confirm and verify the results.
I know what peer review is, its just that peer reviewed things also tend to be scientific studies. I mean I know there are studies of studies and such.
Fair enough. Maybe we had a different understanding of OP’s question. I took it to mean, how can I find out a given article/paper has been reviewed… And that’s not done by looking if it looks scientific, but if the review process has happened.
There are different standards in different fields of knowledge. Medical science is different than journalism, which is different from history, which is different from public safety.
In general, a given field has sources that publish information with the highest standard of credibility. In many fields, these are peer-reviewed journals. They may be published by large universities (Harvard Law Review, Oxford Review of Economic Policy), by government bodies (e.g. Smithsonian Magazine, NIHR), by professional organizations (eg. JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine), or operate independently (e.g. The Lancet, Nature).
It’s peer reviewed if it has the name of a peer-reviewed journal on it. If it’s on arxiv (a pre-print server) it’s not. (Or not yet, or published on several platforms/journals.)
It’s peer reviewed if it has the name of a peer-reviewed journal on it.
Where do journals indicate that they are?
A lot of them will have a front matter, a Wikipedia article. Be cited a lot. And you’ll find them in a university library. You might even have access to a library’s catalogue without being a student or member. Being peer-reviewed will be in the description.
And the bogus “journals” are kind of well-known. I think you’ll find information with a simple Google search.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_journals
“peer-reviewed” is always within the first sentences if you click on something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(medicine)#Biomedical_journals is a good guide for Biomed
I don’t fully believe anything I can’t test and verify myself. Thank fuck NASA left things on the moon you can ping to prove they went there and it’s easy to prove the planet isn’t flat, otherwise I’d be in trouble.
…Does NASA have something on the web that lets people ping the Moon, by any chance?
Sorta…
We left a bunch of retro-reflectors up there, if you got really good aim and a sensitive detector, you can bounce lasers off the moon. If you science hard enough you can probably pull it off.
I don’t think so. You need some special equipment that isn’t too difficult to get.
I’m not checking things for peer review, but a lot of bullshit can be filtered out by a simple Google search. If Aunt Brenda posts a major event on Facebook, but it’s not on any news site, she probably fell for a lie.
Media literacy crash course https://youtube.com/watch?v=sPwJ0obJya0&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtM6jSpzb5gMNsx9kdmqBfmY&index=1&pp=iAQB
The short answer is you don’t. Even in philosophy, a leading model of “truth” is something like “a statement is true if it’s true”. We humans are doomed to be confused and unsure.
The main point is to be able to handle uncertainties in a normal basis, the greyness of reality, despite the temptation of blacks and whites of our minds.
For sure it costs a lot. The consideration of the superposition of possible truths and the weight of potential biases is a huge burden without granted full coverage, but allows you to accumulate a landscape of plausibility of things: yes, is not 100% precise and is still built by personal prejudices but, with a systematic acceptance of new bits of information regardless of how comfortable they are, it can grow a mostly reliable understanding of reality with a variable amount of temporary uncertainty on some facts… and you can still convert greys into quasi-b&w once they reach a decent amount of independent evidences, you now, to free a bit your RAM.
PS: Peer review is neither 100% perfect, is just more solid.
Credibility is earned by being consistently credible. A source that posts misleading or false articles can be assumed to not be credible, and I don’t trust them just like I don’t trust people who say stuff that ends up being not credible.
With newer information, concensus between difference sources us a good indicator as well.
What I am far more likely to use to dismiss something is checking out the purpose of the group. If they have a website and their description sounds like a weasel pretending to be a benevolent protector of a hen house then I just ignore them. Anything that sounds pie in the sky, like revolutionizing or disrupting an established industry is probably another Theranos and easily dismissed. If they say anything that sounds like conservative doublespeak, they get ignored.
It seems to be a pretty reliable system even if the occasional thing that is too good to be true slips in because I want it to be true. But having low expectations and recognizing potential being different from the results helpas a lot with being pleasantly surprised when things turn out better than they sounded.
If we can agree that all “news” sites slant to the right or the left. Then you should check out the story at a few of both leaning sites.
