Re:Astrobiologists Find Ancient Fossils in Meteorite Fragments
by arrrg on Monday March 11, 2013 @02:07PM
(#5358548)
If you are not an expert in the field, it will be very hard if not impossible for you to judge a scientific article on its merits.
In that light, looking at where something was published makes total sense. It’s a completely valid mechanism for non-experts to separate the crap from the good stuff. (Even experts, given all the stuff that is published all the time, have no time to read and evaluate everything on its merits. Increasing efficiency by centralizing that task and not forcing every scientist to do it all the time is more or less the purpose of journals.)
In that light, looking at where something was published makes total sense. It’s a completely valid mechanism for non-experts to separate the crap from the good stuff. (Even experts, given all the stuff that is published all the time, have no time to read and evaluate everything on its merits. Increasing efficiency by centralizing that task and not forcing every scientist to do it all the time is more or less the purpose of journals.)