Kim van der Linde wrote:
Delirium wrote:
No, I can say quite confidently, as a scientist active in academic publishing, that when reviewing a field (which is what encyclopedia articles are), science works on consensus, unless you are specifically writing a "critical review" unapologetically from a particular point of view.
Maybe that your field of expertise works by consensus, mine does not (and honestly, students who think that science works by consensus need to retake philosophy-of-science 101). Consensus is not the same as agreement, and if a topic is really well explored, there might be general agreement among scientists on that topic.
I'm discussing specifically the issue of writing review articles, not of doing original research, since that's the closest to what we we're doing. If you're writing a review article about a field that is currently in flux and not agreed upon, and you claim it to be an attempt at a fair summary of the current debate (not a "critical review"), isn't consensus what you're going for, and what journal editors will require? A paper like that will typically get farmed out to several reviewers from multiple viewpoints, and you'll have to revise it until you reach a... consensus... between the author and the reviewers that the paper represents a fair summary of the current state of the debate. If your initial review gives short shrift to one of the major camps, for example, you're going to have to revise that part until the reviewer from that camp is satisfied that you're at least summarizing his views accurately. That's basically what we're doing here, isn't it?
-Mark