Tony Lee wrote:
> What I intended to say was that the public wants a simple shorthand
> way of determining good science from bad science.
The public has a habit of wanting 3 impossible things before breakfast!
Actually I think a significant proportion of the pubic doesn't want to be
troubled by pesky facts and their damned liberal agenda.
>
> Now IANACS, but I have a question: I often read on sites like
> RealClimate etc, that this or that sceptics' study was published in an
> "obscure" journal. How do you know which journals are better rated?
As a rough guide, the citations index of the journal - the number of times an
average paper is cited - is what people go on, but it's not much use in telling
whether an individual paper is much good. In fact even looking at the paper's
citations isn't worth much, as they may all be pointing out its errors, or just
using it as a generic "further study is needed" peg.
I've heard it said that the best way to get a massively cited paper is to
publish something wrong in Nature.
Rather than worrying about individual papers, it is probably better to rely on
the regular assessment reports eg IPCC, which, although imperfect, describes
pretty well what most scientists working in the area think.
James
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