November 01, 2017 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Peer Review and Henry Oldenburg
Last night I was giving you a brief how
scientific research is usually carried out, mostly in a university set up.
We had reached the part when experiments
have been performed, data has been collected and after discussion with the mentor
regarding conclusion, paper has been written.
Once a paper is ready, potential scientific
journals are chosen which are likely to accept this paper for publication.
Once sent to a journal, there is a waiting
period that can range from few months to sometimes even a year before the
author can come to know if his work is worth or original enough to be accepted
or cruelly rejected.
The editor of the journal might outright
reject the paper if he or she is not impressed with it.
On the other hand if the work sounds
promising or novel enough, the editor then sends the paper for peer review.
The process of peer review conducted in
scientific journal is the key difference that separates a scientific publication
from any other type of publication.
Peer review involves thorough and
meticulous evaluation of the work done in the paper by several people of equal
competency in that field.
In science, this is the crucial self
regulation that maintains high standards of quality but more important, the
credibility of the scientific endeavor.
This is the stage where the wheat is separated
from the chaff and pseudoscience is kept away from true science.
The peer reviewers are spread all over the
world and are apparently the experts in that field.
The paper is subjected to careful and
critical scrutiny where the reviewers specially are on the lookout for
methodology of experimentation, rigor deployed in data analysis and if the
conclusion arrived is actually in agreement with the analyses.
The credit for the creation of scientific
peer review is given to the German theologian and natural philosopher Henry
Oldenburg and lived in 1600s during the times of Robert Boyle.
In fact, he left Germany to settle in
England where he formed a life-long bond of friendship with Robert Boyle.
Besides Robert Boyle, he was also in close
correspondence with Baruch Spinoza.
He was one of the early members of the
Royal Society and was the founding editor of the journal Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society.
It was during this period of editorship
that he started and promoted the practice of sending the submitted manuscripts
to experts who would evaluate the work before its publication.
This perhaps was the beginning of both the
modern scientific journal and the practice of scientific peer review.
Once the paper does get published, it is
highly probable that it will get totally ignored and languish in a dark corner
of a large library not to be read for good by any human ape of this planet.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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