Sidebar: Just Printing Results Doesn't Validate Them
Sidebar: Discouraging Hypotheses Slows Progress
In one of the following essays, Washington University physicist Michael Friedlander urges scientists to interpret what they read in scientific journals not as incontrovertible fact so much as carefully reviewed information that referees have worked to purge of obvious flaws. In a companion essay, endocrinologist and journal editor David Horrobin argues that in their refusal to publish theoretical papers, a majority of journals in the biomedical sciences are depriving researchers of a major source of potential facts--the ideas of scientists who may not be very good experimentalists, but who are capable of spinning off a myriad of new concepts.
--Julia King
