SciWatch.org is founded on the notion that much of today's technology is simply not understood well enough by typical users. Unfortunately, too much reliance is placed on "standard" experimental designs, data analyses, or data displays. This is not a fault of the researchers; the details of technological biases or artefacts are often too subtle or too many to learn in the time available. Much of the blame can be placed on the manufacturers of the technology, who have not dedicate sufficient effort to generating software and hardware tools to help users avoid or even detect such problems.
In any field, there are experts who are well-versed in these issues. The aim of SciWatch is to identify a few such individuals for any given complex technology, and then ask them to volunteer their time by reviewing current literature in their field on a regular basis. These reviews will be posted on the SciWatch.org website.
These reviews will not address the scientific nature of the manuscripts, nor will they make any judgment about the conclusions. Rather, these reviews will address potential problems with the implementation, analysis, and presentation of the experiments and data. The goal is to aid researchers reading the papers to interpret the results.
To do so, reviewers assigned to each field will create and adhere to a very strict set of guidelines. These guidelines will be available on this site. Eventually, we hope that all researchers who endeavor to publish experiments using a technology covered by SciWatch will check over the guidelines and make sure that their presentation is as rigorous as possible.
The concepts and principles of SciWatch are currently under development. If you are interested in participating, please send EMail to SciWatch@SciWatch.org.