35. Peer-review procedure

A peer-review - is a procedure of critical consideration of manuscripts of scientific articles before the publication by scientists-specialists in the same field. The objective of the peer-review is to make sure and in the necessary cases make the author to follow standards, accepted in the specific field or science in a whole. The peer-review is used by publishers for selection and estimation of manuscripts. The activity similar to the peer-review procedure is found in the "Ethics of Doctor", written by Ishak bin Ali al-Ravi (854-931) from Rakha, Sirium. His work, as the more late other Arabian medical documents, says that a doctor, which comes to patient, is always to make notes about the state of the patient every time he visits him.

When the patient was cured or died, the notes of the clinician doctor were looked through by the local medical council, consisting of other doctors, which made review of the notes of the doctor in order to decide if his actions corresponded to the standards accepted in the treatment or not. If their opinions were negative, then the clinician doctor could face with court action from the patient, whose treatment did not correspond to the norms accepted. The procedure of the peer-review of manuscripts before the publication was firstly applied in 1731 at a preparation to publication of the «Medical Essays and Observations» by Henri Oldenburg, who was also the founder of the first scientific journal «Philosophical Transactions». The modern system of peer-review is evolved from this process of the 18th century.

However the peer-review became the generally accepted practice only from the middle of the 20th century. For example, in 1905, which is called a year of miracles in physics, articles of Albert Einstein were published in the German journal «Annalen der Physik», the articles were not formally peer-reviewed before the publication, and were only read by Max Plank (the chief editor of the journal) and Wilhelm Wien (both are Nobel Laureates). Recently there appeared attempts to check the system of peer-reviewing by the way of presentation of senseless texts written by pseudo-scientific language. Successful attempts of such kinds belong to computer program SCIgen - several articles, generated by random way, and were accepted to publication in American, Iranian and Russian journals. The article, published in 2008 year in the Russian periodic issue (then it was a journal from the list of the Higher Attestation Commission) "Journal of scientific publication of aspirants and PhD students" is called "Корчеватель: алгоритм типичной унификации точек доступа и избыточности".

36. Primary and secondary scientific publications

Currently in the international scientific community there is a clear representation of a scientific article as a written and published report, describing the results of the original research and satisfying the definite criteria. Gradually there appeared a notion of "valid/primary scientific publication/literature". This notion appeared under the influence of three hundred year tradition of presentation of scientific investigations' results, and the editorial practice and scientific ethics. Further we will use the term "primary" publication/article/literature. In order to qualify an article as a primary one, it should be published correctly. Even if there was a good investigation and the article is written in a proper way, but it is published in "incorrect" issue, then it can't be considered as a primary publication. The reverse situation is also possible: an article even about modest investigation can turned out to be "correct", if it was correctly published in the primary (correct) scientific literature. Still recently it was a lot of problems on the strict definition of the "primary scientific publication". The Council of Biology Editors in the USA - is an authoritative professional organization - accept the following definition:

The acceptable primary scientific publication - is the first public presentation of the essential information about investigation in the form, which allows colleagues to:

(1) estimate the investigation (2) reproduce the experiment

(3) evaluate the intellectual process, leading to results.

This public presentation of information about investigation must be available for perception by senses, placed on permanent storage medium, available without restriction for scientific community, and also for including in one or more bibliographic systems of referencing of scientific publications (for example, Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Index Medicus, Excerpta Medica, Bibliography of Agriculture and etc. in the USA and analogical systems in other countries). This means that material unpublished earlier about an original investigation should be published in an issue, where firstly the manuscripts are reviewed by colleagues-investigators and only after positive opinions of the reviewers are printed in a journal. It is called a publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and only such a publication is considered to be "correct", and the journal, which follows such rules - is a "correct" scientific literature. And to have the report represented about the original investigation published by such a journal, it should be written in accordance with specific requirements. After publication the article should become available not only for scientists without restriction, but also for referencing and inclusion the information about it in data-bases of scientific-technical information: referencing journal, system of search of scientific-technical information. If the last condition is not valid, then it can lead to the situation that information, contained in the article, will be lost for the scientific community. Saying exactly, it, of course, will be in the text of the article, but it will be impossible to find it as well as to obtain the fact of existence of published results. It is important to note that the peer-reviewed journals accept for publication only manuscripts which are not under consideration of any other issues and were published nowhere earlier. The fact that the manuscript or its essential part has earlier been presented publically in materials of conference, technical bulletin, or placed on site in Internet, can be a reason for refusal in publication. Thus, the "correct scientific article" - is an article, describing the original investigation and published in the peer-reviewing scientific journal, where it can be reproduced only once. Beside the articles about original scientific investigations (original articles) which are placed in the peer-reviewing journals, there are a lot of scientific texts of other types in the other issues, which do not answer the criteria of the primary scientific publication. For example, most of the reports about investigations, carried out on agreements with governmental or private organizations, institutes' works, and institutes' bulletin are not classified as the primary scientific literature. Messages relating to news, articles in corporate issues and journal for restricted (official) use are not correct scientific publications. However in engineering and information-computer fields the patents and technical reports are considered as the primary scientific publications. If there exist the primary scientific literature, then there should exist the secondary one. The review papers are also related to the secondary scientific literature, which are also published in the peer-review journals. The review papers are devoted to the analysis of the earlier published articles, connected by common theme. There exist journals which publish only review papers. They are assigned for generalization, summation, analysis, estimation and synthesis of the information earlier published in the primary publications. The opinion that the review papers do not contain new information is false. On the contrary, there are formulations of new theories, developments of new ideas or even paradigms, and these paper are often cited in other articles. Books (not textbooks) play an important role in the scientific literature, which are often called monographs and devoted to statement of investigation results on large scientific projects, generalization of achievements in the specific direction or compilation of articles, connected by common thematic. Books are related to the secondary scientific literature. Articles on conference reports are published in the appropriate issues (conference reports, conference proceedings). There are messages about the original scientific investigations in such reports, however manuscripts of such publications are not peer-reviewed. The significant part of reports at conferences is not the first public presentations of results of the original research. Most of the reports have a review character, and the presentations of the original research - are only preliminary messages about results, accompanying by interesting thoughts or, on the contrary, presented not for the first time. Neither one nor the other reports cannot be qualified as a "correct" publication. What concerns the preliminary messages, usually more lately the results of these works are published in some primary scientific issue, when the authors have already obtained final and more reliable and extended results, and have treated and documented the experimental methodology thoroughly. Hence, the extended issues of conference materials cannot be considered as the primary scientific literature. If they contain original data, then it is possible to publish them again in a peer- review journal. Lately a part of the reports made at conferences are selected for publication in special issues of peer-review journal and all the selected articles are peer-reviewed. In this case such publications can be considered as the primary literature. There are several important items in the base of classification of scientific publications on the primary and secondary ones. The first one - the peer-review procedure and the standard of structure of scientific publications are the guarantee (although not hundred-percent) of the quality and simplify the perception of readers. A requirement of the fact that it must be the first public presentation of the investigation results stops any repeated publication of the same article, and it means a stop of unnecessary increase of the number of scientific articles. In addition, this requirement can simplify s solution of current and future problem of authorship of those or another discoveries and results in the science. The second one - availability for the bibliographic systems of scientific publications referencing simplify the finding of information, and it means a decrease of the probability of getting lost it. Nowadays more and more members of the international scientific community follow the classification of the scientific publications. The primary scientific publication - describes an original investigation and is published in a peer-review journal. All other publications, review articles, conference materials, monographs, collections - are the secondary scientific literature. And at last, the tertiary scientific publications - are the encyclopedias, textbooks and analogous issues, which are assigned for more wide audience.