This post is a continuation of the discussion about blogging and peer-review by selected reactions at RealClimate (a climate scientists’ community blog) to Nature Geoscience’s two commentaries on blogging.

Philip Machanick writes that the "problem with blogs is that there is no way for an outsider to know which are reasonably careful creations of informed scientists, which are opinions of the scientifically illiterate, and which are astroturf creations designed to confuse critics of science that is in conflict with an industry. Given that terrain, I would rather have something like RealClimate than not: it helps to balance things out. Errors tend to be corrected quickly here as a consequence of a large informed readership (even if it is sometimes annoying that you get drive-by ignoramuses who don’t benefit from getting their misconceptions answered). He goes on to suggest that a site such as RealClimate is of value in providing a forum for rebuttals of peer-reviewed science in order to develop a consensus on whether a “formally published rebuttal is worth the effort”.

Ray Ladbury’s view: “When it comes to peer reviewed papers, one has to presume the reader will have a minimum level of familiarity with the subject matter. One also presumes that the reader will have a day job, and so the question becomes whether the information in the paper is of sufficient interest to the average scientist in the community to say, “Hey, take a look at this. It looks mostly correct to me and has some interesting information/insights/methods…” This is not in any way the gold standard in the sciences. The gold standard comes when the community as a whole says, “Hey, cool, I can use this.” The paper is cited. The techniques are used. Science advances. Eventually, what was in the paper becomes part of the tacit knowledge assumed by reviewers.

The tacit knowledge one can presume for a blog like Realclimate is much lower. One presumes there is an interest in the subject–why else would the reader be perusing the blog. One presumes at least a passing acquaintance with the scientific method and maybe some familiarity with basic results like conservation of energy, etc. One could perhaps assume that the average reader has taken the time to acquaint him- or herself with material to which one is vectored via the ”https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/“>“Start Here” button–although this is far from Universal.

For the average newspaper reader of a science story, the tacit knowledge is nearly nonexistent–or worse, wrong. And then we have the blogosphere, where information density is at best, rarified and often toxic…….in an information economy, it seems that all too many readers and journalists are content to remain paupers.”

Continuing the discussion of the relative contributions of blogs and the peer-reviewed literature to scientific understanding, I’m highlighting another reaction to the two Nature Geoscience Commentaries presenting different perspectives.

In the comment thread at Real Climate blog, Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia writes:

“Blogs have created a forum for many people to informally discuss science. They are also a great forum for scientists to provide context to their own work and to the work of others in their field.

And some of the time, that may take the form of criticism. That’s ok. But we do have to be careful in blurring the line too much between peer-reviewed publications and blogs. The first problem is the obvious one. Blog posts are unfiltered, un-reviewed, and often written off the cuff, while journal articles are screened, reviewed, and (should be) meticulously researched. It is far easier to write a criticism of a paper on one’s blog than to write a response and submit it to the journal. The issue isn’t just that no reviewers check the work… the blog author is unlikely to do even close to the amount of research and analysis nor give the wording nearly the same level of consideration as is expected in a paper submitted to a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal.

The other problem is that blog posts are readily accessible to anyone at anytime, both in language, and in the unlicensed nature of the internet. To a huge swath of the public, blog posts are the face of science. Like it or not, bloggers with scientific credentials are like self-appointed ambassadors for science. If we are going to write about our science, we should do it with thought, and we should do it well. That is a standard that myself and many other science bloggers often struggle to meet.”

The two Nature Geoscience Commentaries expressing opposing views on blogging’s role in science research communication have been much discussed in the blogosphere (see Climate Feedback blog, for example.). One discussion took place at RealClimate blog, where Gavin Schmidt’s post about his Nature Geoscience view on how science blogs and traditional peer-review intersect has attracted more than 100 online comments from climate scientists and others.

One commenter, “Tamino”, writes: “Blogs don’t serve very well for communication among scientists. Peer review does more than just protect us from being inundated with substandard work; it protects authors from their own mistakes and improves the quality of what we write. Peer review itself is an immensely valuable avenue of communication; who among us hasn’t at some time included a phrase like “We thank an anonymous referee for comments and suggestions which dramatically improved the final manuscript”?

But as bad as blogs are for actual research, peer-reviewed journals are far worse for communicating with and educating the lay reader. Yet when it comes to climate science the lay public is hungry for knowledge, and many of them are eager, and well-prepared, for a level of sophistication and detail that can’t be found in lay journalism or even popular literature; An Inconvenient Truth isn’t enough. So blogs serve an incredibly useful purpose, enabling the interested and well-educated reader to share insights with researchers who are at the cutting edge of new knowledge…………………while blogs aren’t part of the machinery for legitimate scientific research, they’re an indispensible tool for communication and combating misinformation.”

More to follow.

Scientists know much more about their field than is ever published in peer-reviewed journals. Blogs can be a good medium with which to disseminate this tacit knowledge, according to Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies Columbia University, and co-founder of RealClimate.org, in a Commentary in the April issue of Nature Geoscience (1, 208; 2008). Dr Schmidt asks “why read a blog when you can go directly to the scientific literature? Unfortunately, access to new findings in the traditional way is harder than it should be. Many technical papers are behind pay-walls, which make it impractical and expensive for unaffiliated individuals to read them. More importantly, however, even when papers are freely available, they often do not provide the insight expected.”

In another Commentary in the same issue of the journal (Nat. Geosci. 1, 209; 2008), Myles Allen of the University of Oxford agrees that “explaining science to journalists and the public on blogs is fast and efficient.” But after his own bruising experience, he wonders: “is it all just too good to be true? Can science survive Web 2.0?”

After describing his own difficult experiences of having his own peer-reviewed work criticised and misinterpreted by people who would not subject their own conclusions to peer-review, Dr Allen concludes: “Everyone agrees we need to communicate science better to the general public. But more and faster should not be confused with better. I’m certainly not advocating closing science blogs or discouraging science websites. We just need to remember the basic courtesies that our doctoral supervisors took for granted: criticism of peer-reviewed results belongs in the peer-reviewed literature. Direct communication over the Internet, far from creating a level playing field, just ploughs it up and makes the game impossible. The problem is, without witty and cutting criticisms, what is the point of a blog? Sure, the peer-review system is creaking. Sure, science journalism sometimes trips up. But like Churchill’s quip about democracy, it is the worst possible system for communicating scientific results, apart from all the alternatives that have been tried from time to time.”

Yet Dr Schmidt remains optimistic: “Some may dismiss blogs as being a distraction from real scientific work, or of egging on the very controversies that we seek to diffuse. There is an element of truth to both of these claims. But the response should not be a return to the ivory tower. That simply leaves the field clear for those who prefer to confuse rather than enlighten. With the importance of science in policy decisions being more apparent than ever, our ability to do science and enhance its relevance in public life relies on the community’s willingness to engage, inspire and inform. Blogs are one way to do that, and they can excel at providing the context that is so often missing in other media. Not every scientist needs to have one, but maybe every scientific field does.”