Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Another post in my continuing inside look at peer review in the scientific community. (I promise this won’t be as long as some of the others.)

I spent much of today reviewing a manuscript for an optics journal. The paper was on a problem that I hadn’t worked on before, but I’ve worked on related issues, and I’ve worked with people who have worked on this problem, so I felt comfortable reviewing it. What’s most interesting to me is that the more of these I do, the more I find that I can really do the job with my general scientific skills rather than hyper-specialized knowledge. I can’t tell you whether anybody else out there has ever published something like this before. (Truthfully, even the people working on that particular problem can’t, since there are all sorts of things buried out there in the literature that never catch on until years later somebody realizes that what he’s working on was done before.) However, I know enough about light collection and curve fitting to figure out the key issues here, confirm that what they’re doing is probably right (extensive replication in multiple groups is the only way to be sure, of course), and also spot the weak points.

It’s fascinating how far I can go with a grasp of the basics, and some experience applying them. I’m really getting to like this peer review business, because I sharpen my skills every time I set myself the task of evaluating a piece of work. And the fact that I draw upon my basic skills more than my hyper-specialized knowledge of the field is, I think, a validation of the way science works. If it were impossible to understand something without hyper-specialized knowledge, progress would grind to a halt. Nobody would be able to communicate with anybody in another field, and it would be impossible to apply anything to a new problem in a different context.

This is not to say that I’d take a review totally outside my field (that would be unfair to everyone involved). I’m only able to apply my basic skills to a piece of work because it’s in a familar context, one where I’m comfortable working and thinking. Still, once I’m in a comfortable zone, the skills that I draw on are the ones that cut across a lot of sub-fields. This is something that I need to think about when I’m planning my lessons: Context and details matter, of course, but what carries you farthest in scientific work (or probably any other work) is (usually) the fundamental skills. (As long as you know enough to know when you need to bone up on the details rather than try to wing it on the fundamentals.)