Peer-reviewed and published - yes, but what does that mean? Long gone are the days when it necessarily means the work is credible.
The scientific literature can be difficult for laypeople (non-scientists) to interpret. One particular aspect of interpreting the literature is distinguishing good work from bad work – and both get published. In a struggle to make this distinction, laypeople often assume that if a journal article is purportedly peer-reviewed, that means it is credible. This assumption is understandable, because that is what laypeople are lead to believe. Implicit in this assumption is that peer-review = expert-review. This is not necessarily true. The growth in the number of journals and the number of scholarly publications (doubling every eight years by some estimates) is exceeding the growth in true experts (a process that takes decades) available to provide review.
There is concern this situation is aggravated by the recent explosion in number of open access journals – thousands of new ones appear each year. Open access publishers charge the authors fees to publish and provide the published articles free to readers (rather than the traditional model where the journal is financed by a scholarly society or by subscriptions). Some of these journals are excellent, but some are predatory (
https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/) – undertaking cursory review in order to proceed to charging fees which are often thousands of dollars.
Finding expert review is particularly problematic in small subspecialty disciplines such as diving physiology, simply because there are very few experts. If the manuscript is published in a journal that has a history of publishing similar work, there is a good chance the editorial staff will recognize what specific expertise is required to review the manuscript and know how to find appropriate experts.
The Journal of Bioengineering and Biomedical Science (
Bioengineering Biomedical Journals | Peer Review | Articles List) is a young journal. I mention this because it is an easy exercise to scroll through all published articles on their website and determine that the journal has no history of publishing articles concerned with decompression physiology or risk analysis, the two areas of specific expertise required to provide expert-review of the Wienke BR “Deep stops model correlations” paper. So this particular journal and this particular paper are a combination where true-expert review might be eluded.
I think that this indeed happened, for the following reasons. The paper is essentially identical to the unpublished manuscript Igor posted on behalf of Wienke two years ago on Rebreatherworld (
http://www.rebreatherworld.com/showthread.php?48461-Correlation-of-popular-diving-models-with-computer-profile-data-and-outcomes/page5&highlight=correlation). That manuscript was described as having been submitted to the journal Computers in Biology and Medicine. Since it was not published there it was evidently rejected after review. From my experience with scientific publication (as an author, reviewer, and editorial board member), I cannot imagine any manuscript, and particularly one that has been rejected from at least one journal, emerging from a true expert-review essentially unchanged.
So how is the layperson supposed to piece all this together and distinguishing good work from bad work? The truth is you probably will not. That is why the efforts of good science-communicators are so valuable.
David Doolette
