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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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I agree with you that science publishing can be of variable quality. One solution for the reader IS to never trust one paper alone, scientific knowledge is established when many papers are published about the same topic and give the same conclusions.
So bigger number = more true?
Actually, yes.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF), is a very important part of establishing credibility.
Reputable journals are very selective about what they publish. They're worried about their JIF.
If you get published in a journal with a high JIF, you can be as close to possible as establishing a foundation of fact, as their articles have a high chance of being both reproducible and accurate.
If there was a casino that took bets for which scientific discoveries would be true ten years from now, I would make money all decade long by betting on high ranking JIF articles.
I wish you could hear yourself.
Don't worry, I do. The problem here is that there are two different definitions of truth. Scientific Truth/Fact is what we are left with after we rule out what is not true.
Science doesn't make declarative statements about what is true in any ultimate sense. But when we talk about truth in science, we're referring to the scientific consensus.
When we use the scientific method, we deduce facts about reality, then use those facts to infer "truth". Of course, science is often wrong, and we discover when truth is wrong in the second half of the process.