Credit: Tray Butler
The whirlwind pace of innovation in the 21st century conceals a dark secret of science: Research is generally at least a year old before it appears in scientific journals.
Publishing a study is often a downright lethargic process: Researchers with a hot new result submit an article to a journal, wait a minimum of three months for experts in the field to review the findings and then spend another few months revising to the reviewers' recommendations. When a paper is finally accepted, it is edited again and checked by the authors, only to linger—often for several more months—for its turn at the printer.
The process can take so long that some scientists have decided to avoid it altogether.
UCLA brain researcher Marco Iacoboni conducted an "instant-science" study, measuring the brain response of five participants while they watched ads from last month's Super Bowl. Rather than publishing his results a year or more later, they appeared the next day on the website of the Edge Foundation, a discussion forum for scientists, philosophers, and other prominent intellectuals. Iacoboni admitted that the article wasn't publishable in a journal, but the point was to show how scientific methods could be used to produce immediate feedback for advertisers.
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Given the recent hot news about fraudulent stem cell research in South Korea and cancer research in Norway, it appears that scientists are being pulled in two directions when deciding how to disseminate their results: On the one hand, they want to get the information out as quickly as possible, but on the other hand, they understand that other scientists need to verify that information to ensure the results are sound.
"I don't mind others seeing my pre-reviewed preprint. I sometimes send an important article to a few colleagues in my field," said University of Iowa perception researcher Andrew Hollingworth, who allows his peers to take his research into account as they pursue their own work. But Hollingworth said he would be "uncomfortable going to the media without peer review. While casual readers of a newspaper might not understand the peer review process, they would assume research published there has been examined in detail."
Emory psychologist Drew Westen waited a bit longer than UCLA's Iacoboni to publicize the results of his study on the 2004 presidential election. He and four other researchers performed brain imaging on a group of volunteers selected for their strong identification with either the Democratic or Republican parties.
Fourteen months after the election, in a January 24th press release on Emory's web site, Westen announced that when political partisans encountered a statement by their favored candidate that contradicted his public position, they observed little activity in the rational centers of the brain.
"What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up," Westen said in the press release.
Westen's study hasn't been published. Emory released the news in anticipation of his presentation of preliminary results at the January 28th meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. That didn't stop newspapers, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, from reporting on the study. In addition, the popular blog Slashdot posted the results, attracting over 800 comments. Over 300 other sites featured the findings, with precious few noting that the research hadn't actually been published. Westen expected the release to gain notice, but says he's been "shocked" at how much buzz the story has generated.
"We would have loved to have this data out right after the election," Westen said, noting that instead he submitted it to a respected neuroscience journal. "We had it peer reviewed—went through first round, got positive reviews—and we're now revising the article."
In addition, a summary of the article was reviewed before he was allowed to speak at the January conference. "At that point, we felt comfortable with strong data, and decided to make it public," he said.