scientist believes he or she has demonstrated. That's the beauty of it. It's competitive - sometimes sharply so. The path to the Nobel Prize or an endowment-funded professorship is a new theory you publish that appears to be correct.
My work requires me to read a lot of journal articles about neuroscience research. Most of them are not useful, really. But, from time to time, someone reports some research that provides new insights that are valuable. The need to publish is strong out there in academia, which explains the sharp rise in the number of journals in most disciplines. It also means that finding the sharp needles in the haystack is more difficult.
Since most journal articles are hidden behind a paywall, except for their abstracts, it can get expensive to weed out the wheat from the chaff. Thank goodness for University libraries that grant online access to scholarly journals for their alumni. But, oh my goodness, there is a lot of publishing going on in most scientific disciplines.
This past week, I downloaded a dozen articles. Only one of them had anything useful in it. My favorite was one with an abstract that said one thing, while the actual research was about something completely different. How that got accepted for publication, I do not know, but the Ph.D. candidate who wrote it was deliberately deceptive in the abstract. I wasted about half an hour of my time. I won't be looking at that journal again for articles.
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