Nature Communications published a paper last week that argues that the media pay undue attention to people who do not worry much about climate change. The journal and authors are now in all sorts of trouble because they identified those people, smeared their name, and released personal data. The journal editor confirmed that she did not check whether the paper had IRB approval.**

UC Merced confirms that the paper had no such approval*** and argues that it did not need such approval because no data were collected on political views or academic qualifications.**** Yet, paper and press release refer to views and qualification, the paper obliquely as "political origins" and "non-scientific experts", the press release explicitly with its "false authority" and "lack [of] scientific training". If no data were collected on political views and academic qualifications, then how do the authors support these remarks?

Regardless of the above, the paper is bad. At its core, it compares a sample (A) of researchers who are well published and cited in climate research to another sample (B) who are skeptical of climate policy and prominent in the media. They conclude that sample (A) is better published and cited in climate research while sample (B) attracts more media attention.

It should be trivial to support a trivial hypothesis, but the authors managed to mess it up. Samples (A) and (B) overlapped and people were removed from sample (A). Rob and Ray Bradley were mixed up. Barbara and Harold Betts, realtors praising the climate of California, were seemingly mistaken for Richard Betts, a climate modeller.* Or maybe its Kelly Betts, a photographer for the local newspaper.* Judith Curry may have been mistaken for a dish of Indian origin.* Media attention for Marc Morano was mostly from Morano's blog. (A secondary conclusion in the paper is that non-conventional media pay more attention to people like Morano.) And the paper ignores those who, without academic credentials, argue for climate policy in media, such as Al Gore, Leonardo di Caprio and Greta Thunberg.

How did this paper get published? The authors are trained as natural scientists and, moonlighting in the social sciences, may not have been aware of the rules that apply to working with human subjects. For two years, the authors worked with human subjects and never paused to wonder about the ethics or consult with a social scientist. You cannot just go around and identify someone with a "lack [of] scientific training" or as a member of a "political movement" -- not if you collected data to prove your point and certainly not, as seems to have happened here, without such data.

The editors did not stop them either, nor did the referees.

The referees did not spot the basic flaws in research design and data collection, errors that were very quickly found post publication. The paper's acknowledgements refer to anonymous referees and James Painter, whose own research does not go beyond basic descriptive statistics.

Over the last few years, we have seen published a number of papers on the science-media interface that are very bad, so bad that the idea should have been killed over the first coffee. Those papers were challenged but never corrected or retracted. Editors therefore now have a pool of referees who do not know the first thing about research ethics or experimental design.

If the Nature Communications paper stands, Petersen, Vincent and Westerling will be asked to review similar papers in the future.


*Ruth Dixon argues that all references to the Laguna Beach Independent were removed in an intermediate step not described in the paper.
** De Raneiri, personal communication, 20 August 2019.
*** Eric Kalmin, personal communication, 23 August 2019.
**** Luanna Putney, personal communication, 28 August 2019.