Wikipedia:Scientific peer review

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

This page concerns the peer review of science articles on Wikipedia. It aims to offer a high-calibre, content-oriented critique of articles on scientific subjects. Peer review is one of the most important tools on Wikipedia. Over the past few months we have been under the spotlight over our accuracy, receiving reviews from newspapers and academic journals. Nature deemed us, on scientific articles, as error-laden as Britannica. Wikipedia has now matured from a small intellectual exercise into a serious and respectable source of information. As such, we are trying to find ways in which our articles can provide reliable information to the public—the process for Wikipedia 1.0 and a validation feature are just beginning. From now on, we must do our best to ensure that as many articles as possible, especially our scientific articles, are factually accurate and of a high standard.

The primary objective is to encourage better articles by having contributors who may not have worked on articles, and in particular for editors who are experts in the topic involved, to examine them and provide ideas for further improvement.

The peer review process is highly flexible and can deal with articles of any quality; however, requesting reviews on very short articles may not be productive, as there is little for readers to comment on.

All reviews are conducted by fellow editors—usually members of one of the many Science WikiProjects. While there is a general intent to expand this process to ensure review by subject experts in a more formal way, possibly through the use of an elected Board, consensus on how to achieve this has not been reached.

The process here resembles the Wikipedia:Peer review process. Indeed it has been suggested that we work in part through that process, but this is something for the future. A special page, such as Wikipedia:Scientific peer review/Science is created to collect the review comments. Interested participants scan the notice board, and participate in the reviews of articles in which they are interested. This mechanism builds on proven and successful WP methods for handling and managing requests.

Related pages:

• Wikipedia:Peer review.
• Wikipedia:External peer review of the overall quality of Wikipedia content
• Wikipedia:Expert review an older similar proposal.
• Wikipedia:Article assessment rates articles from a particular topic.
• Wikipedia:CVG Peer review deals with computer and video games-related topics.
• Military history Peer Review deals with their articles in a similar way to this proposal.
• The discussion page for SPR methodology and philosophy of scientific peer review

Peer review at this project is no longer active and scientific articles should be directed to the general Wikipedia peer review. Reviews of articles that were completed are archived here.

As noted at Talk:Environmental chemistry please do any work in consensus with other editors. Removing large sections leaving bare headings is not the right way to proceed.  Velella  ^{Velella Talk}   08:50, 12 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think I posted this on an archived discussion and will look for a better place to post--Guy vandegrift (talk) 09:49, 14 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

According to this survey, the prime disincentive against making scholarly contributions to Wikipedia is that it will not advance careers. Wikiversity:First Journal of Science will be a peer-reviewed journal that should alleviate this problem for recent college graduates who are not expected to have published in the established scholarly journals.

The word "First" in the title is intended to suggest that we need more journals like this. The Wikiversity:First Journal of Science was patterned after the Wikiversity Journal of Medicine, but will have a somewhat more informal flavor, consistent with this new journal's intent to focus on teaching at the undergraduate college level. Wikiversity:First Journal of Science will attribute with bylines that list usernames only, in contrast with the use of real names by the Wikiversity Journal of Medicine

Another unique feature of Wikiversity:First Journal of Science is that edited versions of Wikipedia articles are welcome, and are presented as Wikipedia articles on the Wikiversity journal via permalinks to the history of Wikipedia articles. This is currently accomplished in a rather awkward fashion, by moving the Wikipedia article into the editor's user space, and after proper attribution, deleting all that extraneous prose that Wikipedia articles tend to acquire. An example of this shown in one of the three "pseudo-articles" that were used to create a mockup issue. Of the three "pseudo-articles" in this mockup, I consider only one to be suitable for publication. It is Wikipedia's Introduction to quantum mechanics. Note how the logo was inserted into the "pseudo-accepted" version without permission of the article's current editors. In other words, all of Wikipedia's 5 million articles are candidates for publication in this journal, and in a manner of speaking, have already effectively submitted their manuscripts to Wikiversity:First Journal of Science for review--Guy vandegrift (talk) 05:24, 14 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]