About Skeptical Science New Research

What is Skeptical Science New Research?

Started in 2012 by Skeptical Science volunteer Ari Jokimäki, Skeptical Science New Research is a weekly survey of scientific research on matters in connection with anthropogenic climate change, spanning all domains of scientific inquiry. Each edition provides readers with a sampling of the latest peer reviewed research results helping us to better understand and deal with our climate predicament, categorized as best as possible and providing direct links to articles as published in a wide variety of scientific journals. 

As well, each edition features selected governent and NGO publications touchin on anthropogenic climate change.

The current editors of New Research are Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack.

Why New Research?

• Skeptical Science is founded on the concept that science and scientific research results provide us with facts "best as we know" to help with our successful existence, specifically in our case anthropogenic climate change and how to deal with it. Thanks to our species' instinct to answer questions, every day of every week of every year our global scientific enterprise helps us to improve "best as we know."  New Research provides our readers with an inkling of this mighty river of progress. 

• Helping people to avoid falling into the harmful cognitive trap misnomered as "climate change skepticism" is a key mission purpose of Skeptical Science. Each week, New Research provides any reader willing to devote a little effort a black-and-white means of understanding the profoundly strong scientific consensus on the reality of our changing our planet's climate. Perhaps even more importantly, the sprawl of scientific disciplines and domains reporting every week on observations and analysis consistent with the concept of anthropognenic climate change starkly reveals profound expert and evidentiary consilience that our species is indeed changing our climate. 

Obtaining articles without journal subscriptions

We know it's frustrating that many articles we cite here are not free to read. One-off paid access fees are generally astronomically priced, suitable for such as "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light"  but not as a gamble on unknowns. With a median world income of US$ 9,373, for most of us US$ 42 is significant money to wager on an article's relevance and importance. 

• Here's an excellent collection of tips and techniques for obtaining articles, legally.

• Unpaywall offers a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that automatically indicates when an article is freely accessible and provides immediate access without further trouble. Unpaywall is also unscammy, works well, is itself offered free to use. The organizers (a legitimate nonprofit) report about a 50% success rate

• The weekly New Research catch is checked against the Unpaywall database with accessible items identifed with green text "Open Access." Often this means the article is free to read directly from the title link. If not, clicking on "Open Access" will lead to an accepted manuscript or other alternate but still canonical copy of the article in question. 

How is New Research assembled?

Most articles appearing here are found via direct inspection of RSS feeds from journal publishers. In any given week, from 1,500 or so candidate articles 100-150 end up in the week's respective edition.

Relevant articles are then queried against the Unpaywall database, to identify open access articles and expose useful metadata for articles appearing in the database. 

The objective of New Research isn't to cast a tinge on scientific results or to color readers' impressions with a biased perspective. Hence candidate articles are assessed via two metrics only:

• Was an article deemed of sufficient merit by a team of journal editors and peer reviewers? The fact of journal RSS output assigns a "yes" to this automatically. 
• Is an article relevant to the topic of anthropogenic climate change?

A few journals offer public access to "preprint" versions of articles for which the review process is not yet complete. When possible these won't appear in New Research until accepted for publication. For certain journals this preprint announcement is the only mention we'll see in RSS feeds; these are included in New Research, flagged as "preprint."

The section "Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives" includes some items that are not scientific research reports per se but fall instead into the category of "perspectives," observations of implications of research findings, areas needing attention, etc.

Suggestions

Please let us know if you're aware of an article you think may be of interest for Skeptical Science research news, or if we've missed something that may be important. Send your input to Skeptical Science via our contact form.

Journals covered

A list of journals we cover may be found here. We welcome pointers to omissions, new journals etc.