Publication and Publicity

What’s a science blogger to do when the media is awash with stories about a paper that hasn’t been published yet? This was the dilemma I was faced with last week when I started reading stories about Watt el al.’s paper about possible seismic influences on volcanic eruptions in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the subject of yesterday’s post. My interest was immediately piqued, so I headed over to the EPSL website to read all about it.
Except it wasn’t there. Perhaps it was under “Articles in Press”? Nope, not there either.
What to do, then? My personal feeling is that one of the main ways that scientific blogging can augment the public discussion about published research is by going back to the original paper. This not only allows you to check that its conclusions have been correctly reported, but gives you access to the story behind those conclusions: the methods employed to obtain them, and the arguments used to support them. Without that, whilst you can possibly add some perspective on why this particular study might be important, you’re basically limited to regurgitation and speculation, rather than explanation. But if you wait, then the attention of the general public will have wandered elsewhere.
This time, the article in question made it online only a few days later, at the beginning of this week; but this isn’t the first time this happened to me. A couple of weeks after I discussed a study which claimed the Grand Canyon was older than previously thought, I read another press release on EurekaAlert about another study that claimed an even greater age. That was released on April 10th; the paper itself was not online until a month later (technically, of course, Watt et al. is not published yet either).
Has anyone else encountered this problem? In both cases it seems the original press release did refer to the fact that the research was not yet published (even if in the recent case, this admission doesn’t make it into the BBC version); but I find the fact that in some cases publication seems to have been completely decoupled from the public fanfare a little troubling. Maybe there’s something to be said for the more rigorous embargoes employed by the likes of Nature after all.