Paris

Scientists have been rapped on the knuckles by a panel of academics who spent more than a year assessing public awareness of peer review.

The panel's report, published on 24 June, says that researchers and their institutions should explain the importance of peer review to the public to help them to weigh up scientific claims. Every time scientific results are presented in public, it should be made clear which parts of the claims have been peer reviewed and which have not, the academics say.

“A culture of explaining and asking about peer review all along the line — from radio phone-ins to ministerial briefings — will put a lot more pressure on people to explain exactly what the status of the work is,” says Tracey Brown, director of the London-based watchdog Sense About Science, which produced the report.

The Sense about Science panel included Colin Blakemore, head of the UK Medical Research Council; Peter Lachmann, an immunologist at the University of Cambridge; and John Maddox, former editor of Nature.

Their report lists a litany of scares that had their origin in publicized but unpublished claims, including the health risks of radiation from mobile phones, the fear that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine could cause autism, and that acrylamide in fried foods could cause cancer. Such scares could be killed at birth if journalists and politicians paid more attention to the publication status of the original claims, says Brown.

That's an ambitious goal. A poll commissioned this year by the Science Media Centre and Nature — conducted by the London-based market-research company MORI — showed that almost 75% of the public don't know what peer review is. Sense About Science will work with research and educational bodies to encourage teaching about peer review in schools and universities, says Brown.

But scientists themselves are the report's main target. Researchers often whine about the hassles of peer review, complaining about the practicalities and potential flaws of the system, says Brown. Instead, she says, scientists should use peer review to explain to the public the validity of scientific claims. “Here is something in scientists’ armoury to help the public understand science better, but they never think about peer review apart from moaning about it,” says Brown.