The Peer-Review Dilemma

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to provide more context about the scientific debates it describes. It now includes an expanded description of Kristian Andersen’s characterizations of what constitutes typical collaboration during the peer-review process. It has also been updated to clarify that a faculty committee at the University of Florida stated that Joseph Ladapo may have violated research-integrity standards, but the university declined to investigate. It has been updated to elaborate on the nature of the edits made to the state analysis led by Ladapo prior to release. And it has been updated to include Brown’s defense of the Nature paper that was the subject of his “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” essay.

Updated at 11:06 a.m. ET on October 3, 2023

In recent months, two loud public discussions have taken up the question of what scientists think of their research. “I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” the climatologist Patrick Brown wrote in an posted earlier this month, just days after his had appeared in the journal . The paper’s main finding, that global warming makes extreme wildfires more common, was based on a willful oversimplification of reality, he confessed—and it did not represent his private view that other factors are as or more important.