科学記事の「正確さ」評価の際にみられる専門家のバイアス

抄録

　A questionnaire was distributed to twenty-nine scientists, in which they were asked to evaluate the accuracy of scientific articles, to check if there is some specific tendency among scientists in this kind of evaluation. Twenty-two news stories, reporting the International Astronomical Union’s decision that the Pluto should be excluded from planets in the solar system, were collected from six general newspapers in Japan, and scientists were requested to rate each of them in terms of its accuracy in ten grades with brief comments.

　Scientists tend to assign higher marks to stories which contain scientific facts, such as the definition of the solar system planets, than to related less scientific ones. Many scientists expressed their dislike of the stories with subjective wording,“demoted Pluto”in this case. These results show that the evaluation tendency among scientists should be taken into account in interpreting the news story accuracy which is often mentioned by them.