How do scientific research articles get published? How do we know their results aren’t faked? What exactly are scientific journals and how do researchers get revenue from publishing their research work?
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Let’s start with the last question.
Generally some Master’s (in some countries) and all PhD students in scientific fields get paid either with a grant they got or a grant they were offered from a prof. Where does the grant come from? Either the students or the prof or the group submit a project proposal to some authority or government body or some funding agency, they explain the problem in the field, how they intend to fix it, and how this would impact the world. If the agency is convinced, they give them the money: it’s usually from tax payers money, by can also be from pharma companies or charities or whatever (conflict of interest might arise). The money then covers everything from consumables to instruments to wages of people you hire for the project and salary or stipend of the main student. Post doctoral fellows are similar, but they get paid typically from their own grant (they bring their own project when they join the lab, and they already have an approved funding, they just need a lab to work), but post docs can also join a lab that already has a grant (usually super rich labs in top universities). Professors get money from the university itself and they also typically have side jobs as some consultant or the CEO of a spin off/start up bio tech company and so on.
So publishing per se doesn’t pay you (in fact you often end up paying for it). But publishing good science shows your employers that you’re good and productive, which makes them hire you and pay you (also for grant agencies to give you money).
Let’s get to the first questions. How’s quality controlled? Well.. It goes like this: you write up a paper, with figures and tables showing the data. You don’t show everything, that would be way too long, you skip out on the controls and validation experiments and pick out representative stuff and so on. Now when the paper is received it depends on the journal, but usually it goes through a preliminary assessment where they decide is this at all fit to be in the journal in terms of field? Is the quality standard at least in the ball park of our journal? Are the authors sketchy or from some weird place you never even heard of? Etc.
Once this step is done. Then there is I think the editor choosing whether he recommends this for publishing in the journal. This is just based on quality, significance, reputation, vision, etc. If yes, then a group of experts who are usually professors are chosen from around the world who are good at the field of that paper and pretty up to date. Sometimes the profs are the go to profs for the journal, sometimes they’re new and so on. Then these professors read the manuscript and criticize the living shit out of it. They look at the quality of the data, the validity of the data, the credibility of the methods, the sensibility of the whole approach, the interpretation of the results, does this fall in line with previous literature? Is it completely conflicting with everything we know? If so, is there a possible reason or just straight out bs? Are the controls properly done? And so on. They really scrutinize the paper and dig it to the bone.
Then it’s a dynamic process. After the first review round, the profs sent their recommendation and opinion to the editor. The editor, based on the. Comments, decides hmm.. Okay this is worth it. So he sends the author that they have preliminary acceptance if they respond to the comments. The comments can be questions for clarification, asking for the controls that aren’t shown, asking for more experiments to make sure the observed effect is real and reproducible, ask for the actual raw untouched data (this is usually done to studies showing revolutionary data, they want to make sure it’s not made up, and trust me some papers before have been found to be fake this way, they can even analyze the noise in the system to see if it’s random or there’s a pattern). They can also ask for changes to text, writing style, etc… Etc. Then it’s a cycle.. Back and forth between the authors and the reviewers, until the reviewers are satisfied and say okay. We’re good. Then it gets published in the next available issue.
Of course.. This is high end journal stuff. Like nature, science, cell, etc and also stuff like PNAS, endocrinology, etc. But crappy journals from some random country with an impact factor of 0.2 are usually extremely careless and don’t give two shits if your data is true.
Once a paper gets published in a good journal, that doesn’t mean it’s fact. Some fake data still makes its way through. And if it’s bad enough it usually gets retracted later. Like that Wakefield crap. But sometimes the model used in the paper or the protocol followed or something is actually suboptimal and renders inaccurate data or something specific to their set up but cannot be reproduced. This is usually found by later papers. I mean all science builds on itself. Most of what you do in a paper depends on protocols by other papers. And you use the protocol of another paper and it doesn’t give you their result because you have a different model, and then others find themselves in the same shoes, well eventually that paper loses its value and gets cited very little. Science is all about reproducibility. Even if you succeed in scamming a journal, it’s impossible to scam the scientific community and they find out in a few years (very easy to scam the public though.. Too damn easy).
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