New Research article selection

It's possible to be too close to a job, forget to step back and look at it from all angles.

Skeptical Science was recently contacted by an author of a paper listed here in the weekly research list, with the concern that our citation of the work meant we felt there was a problem with it. Not at all, because that's not how Research News works or its purpose. We've cleared up that particular misunderstanding in correspondence and with a happy outcome. This is however an indicator and good opportunity to explain how papers in the weekly listing are selected, so as to be quite clear in our intentions with Research News.

We rely entirely on the judgement of journal editors and peer reviewers for estimating the worth of any paper listed in Research News. Weekly assembly includes human assessment of relevancy of items delivered by filtered RSS feeds from academic journals but purely in a mechanical fashion. "Relevancy" in this context means that the article includes anthropogenic climate change as a significant element— regardless of findings, affiliations etc. Passage through the review and publication process is the best indicator we have of the validity of any given work. It would be folly to second-guess successful publication outcomes and indeed overcoming this common error is Skeptical Science's main reason for being.

The purpose of Research News is to provide at least a sampling of the scope and direction of scientific inquiry driven by anthropogenic climate change, lend a toehold for the average person into the rich veins of literature citations underpinning this work. In their respective lists of citations each paper we list here is a portal into a world of specialized inquiry, a ticket into an amazing continuum of investigation. By looking at categories of papers we can get some notion of where interest is hot, where concern may be concentrated. As a case in point, agronomic adaptation research at has featured prominently and consistently in the weekly list, reflecting concern over food supplies in a changing climate, with each publication resting on a prior body of research as reflected in citations.

Unlikely as the eventuality is, Research News would quickly reflect any genuine scientifically grounded reversal in the rather grim picture we now see regarding our climate. Such a happy eventuality would come out of the familiar and statistically reliable publication process and our standard operating procedure, not as a matter of our own local judgement.

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Legally obtaining copies of "paywalled" articles