Oceanography | Vol. 38, No. 3
88
THE OCEANOGRAPHY CLASSROOM
HOW TO GET FACTUAL DATA
AND ARTICLES
SURVIVING IN TODAY’S ONLINE WORLD
By Simon Boxall
As oceanographers, as scientists, we learn from an early stage in
our careers that science is apolitical: the outcomes are what they
are regardless of what we or others would like them to be. Our role
is to gather and interpret data, with significant peer review prior
to publishing and with our data open to full scrutiny. In this area,
access to primary data is a must. We are taught to only put our
best work forward, satisfied that it is true as far as the data we have
used allows, and a credit to us, our institutions, and our profes-
sion. To achieve a full scientific understanding of our subject, we
research and study for decades, and we are often the most critical
of our own work. Until recently, we have not taken it much beyond
that. The education of our students has very much followed that
credence for generations.
This was all fine until online “experts” started offering their own
“facts” after spending a few minutes reading around a subject. For
example, there are people who genuinely believe the Earth is flat—
and they have great debates about it online, blind to any actual
evidence. How can you debate nonsense? A YouGov poll in 2018
found that 4% of Americans and 3% of British people thought the
world was flat. That grew (!) in 2022 to over 10% in the United
States—I have no figures for the UK (a true scientist sticking to
evidence), but I would suspect a similar rise. Something like 40%
of Americans think humans and dinosaurs roamed the Earth
together. To scientists, these are silly concepts, but their growth
and uptake ignore all solid scientific evidence.
Falsehoods become more damaging when they cross over into
biasing our students’ views on what is true and what is false. We
have seen the dangerous impact of false information on vaccines—
the science that eradicated smallpox and almost eradicated polio
and measles has had a public backlash, with over 20% of the UK
population believing that inoculations are harmful. Another grow-
ing movement is against any evidence of climate change, with a
third of British citizens over 55 dismissing it as not being an issue.
More of a concern is the growing number of scientists who
are ignoring the unwritten ethos of honesty in science. There is
a rise in the publication of sham science papers written by those
who desperately need scientific publications for promotion or sal-
ary consideration. It appears that there are organizations—“paper
mills”—that supply fabricated work for publication that sometimes
slips through the net of peer review. A study published in Nature
showed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions of
papers that were proven to be false post-publication. In 2022 it was
4,000, and in 2024 over 10,000. I know of one case firsthand where
a colleague was sent a paper to review that looked familiar—and it
turned out to be a direct copy of a paper published four years ear-
lier and co-authored by this person. We also see dubious papers
on oceanographic subjects published in journals that focus on reli-
gion and are unlikely to have a critical editorial board or a wealth
of expert reviewers, and so papers get published. It is a growing
trend and one that is driven by pressures on scientists to publish
results at a high output rate.
What has this to do with education in oceanography? There are
three key areas here, the first being access to primary data. NOAA
and NASA have without a doubt provided the best resources for
students globally to access a plethora of data online and free of
charge. There is also a relatively new European resource that brings
both observational data and global models together, and of course
a number of sites that offer live Argo float data can be viewed and
downloaded. I use these platforms regularly for teaching exercises
and for student research projects: Have hurricanes increased as
a result of a warming ocean? Do hurricanes and tropical storms
enhance vertical mixing and supply of nutrients for productivity?
How have El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events changed
in character over the past 30 years? You get the idea, and the pri-
mary data for topics like these, which once would have involved a
major task to gather, can now be accessed in minutes. Importantly,
we know that these data are from reliable and trustworthy sources.
The second area is that today we need to teach students to be
skeptical of articles that appear in newspapers, on social media,
and increasingly in peer-reviewed journals. If it doesn’t seem to
make sense, it probably isn’t right. I raised this issue about who and
what to trust a few years ago in this journal along with suggesting
ways of getting students to question everything they find. Over the
past couple of years, this approach has become even more critical.
What was the journal? Does it have a good reputation in your field
of study? Is it clear when it was submitted and then finally accepted
for publication? If these dates are only days apart, it is either the
paper of the decade with groundbreaking science or more likely