How Research becomes Scientific Knowledge?

As our friends at Megacorp illustrate, doing research in the lab or in the field may be science, but it isn't necessarily a contribution to knowledge. No one in the scientific community will know about, or place much confidence in, a piece of scientific research until it is published in a peer-reviewed journal. They may hear about new research at a meeting or learn about it through the grapevine of newsgroups, but nothing's taken too seriously until publication of the data.

     That means that our ecologist has to write a paper (called a "manuscript" for rather old-fashioned reasons). In the manuscript she justifies why her particular piece of research is significant, she details what methods she used in doing it, she reports exactly what she observed as the results, and then she explains what her observations mean relative to what was already known.

     She then sends her manuscript to the editors of a scientific journal, who send it to two or three experts for review. If those experts report back that the research was done in a methodologically sound way and that the results contribute new and useful knowledge, the editor then approves publication, although almost inevitably with some changes or additions. Within a few months (we hope), the paper appears in a new issue of the journal, and scientists around the world learn about our ecologist's findings. They then decide for themselves whether they think the methods used were adequate and whether the results mean something new and exciting, and gradually the paper changes the way people think about the world.

     Of course there are some subtleties in this business. If the manuscript was sent to a prestigious journal like Science or Nature, the competition for publication there means that the editors can select what they think are only the most ground-breaking manuscripts and reject the rest, even though the manuscripts are all well-done science. The authors of the rejected manuscripts then send their work to somewhat less exalted journals, where the manuscripts probably get published but are read by a somewhat smaller audience. At the other end of the spectrum may be the South Georgia Journal of Backwater Studies, where the editor gets relatively few submissions and can't be too picky about what he or she accepts into the journal, and not too many people read it. For better or worse, scientists are more likely to read, and more likely to accept, work published in widely-distributed major journals than in regional journals with small circulation.

     To summarize, science becomes knowledge by publication of research results. It then may become more general knowledge as writers of textbooks pick and choose what to put in their texts, and as professors and teachers then decide what to stress from those textbooks. Publication is critical, although not all publication is created equal. The more a newly published piece of research challenges established ideas, the more it will be noted by other scientists and by the world in general.

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