Consensus is achieved through scholarly communication at conferences, the publication process, replication of reproducible results by others, scholarly debate,[3][4][5][6] and peer review. A conference meant to create a consensus is termed as a consensus conference.[7][8][9] Such measures lead to a situation in which those within the discipline can often recognize such a consensus where it exists; however, communicating to outsiders that consensus has been reached can be difficult, because the "normal" debates through which science progresses may appear to outsiders as contestation.[10] On occasion, scientific institutes issue position statements intended to communicate a summary of the science from the "inside" to the "outside" of the scientific community, or consensus review articles[11] or surveys[12] may be published. In cases where there is little controversy regarding the subject under study, establishing the consensus can be quite straightforward.
^Laudan, Larry (1984). Science and Values: The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate. London, England, UK: University of California Press. ISBN0-520-05267-6.
^Ford, Michael (2008). "Disciplinary authority and accountability in scientific practice and learning"(PDF). Science Education. 92 (3): 409. Bibcode:2008SciEd..92..404F. doi:10.1002/sce.20263. Construction of scientific knowledge is first of all public, a collaborative effort among a community of peers working in a particular area. 'Collaborative' may seem a misnomer because individual scientists compete with each other in their debates about new knowledge claims. Yet this sense of collaboration is important: it checks individual scientists from being given authority for new knowledge claims prematurely.
^Webster, Gregory D. (2009). "The person-situation interaction is increasingly outpacing the person-situation debate in the scientific literature: A 30-year analysis of publication trends, 1978-2007". Journal of Research in Personality. 43 (2): 278–279. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2008.12.030.
^Horstmann, K. T., & Ziegler, M. (2016). Situational Perception: Its Theoretical Foundation, Assessment, and Links to Personality. In U. Kumar (Ed.), The Wiley Handbook of Personality Assessment (1st ed., pp. 31–43). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. ("In Personality Assessment, Walter Mischel focused on the instability of personality and claimed that it is nearly impossible to predict behavior with personality (Mischel, 1968, 2009). This led to the person-situation debate, a controversy in psychology that sought to answer the question whether behavior depended more on the subject's personality or the situation (or both) and has received considerable research attention (Webster, 2009).")
^Jennette, J. C.; Falk, R. J.; Bacon, P. A.; Basu, N.; Cid, M. C.; Ferrario, F.; Flores-Suarez, L. F.; Gross, W. L.; Guillevin, L.; Hagen, E. C.; Hoffman, G. S.; Jayne, D. R.; Kallenberg, C. G.; Lamprecht, P.; Langford, C. A.; Luqmani, R. A.; Mahr, A. D.; Matteson, E. L.; Merkel, P. A.; Ozen, S.; Pusey, C. D.; Rasmussen, N.; Rees, A. J.; Scott, D. G.; Specks, U.; Stone, J. H.; Takahashi, K.; Watts, R. A. (2013). "2012 revised International Chapel Hill Consensus Conference Nomenclature of Vasculitides". Arthritis and Rheumatism. 65 (1): 1–11. doi:10.1002/art.37715. ISSN0004-3591. PMID23045170.