The “Black Swan ” Phenomenon in Science Publishing: Warning Shot

The purpose of this letter is to examine whether the black swan phenomenon, as proposed by Taleb (2007), may be taking place in science publishing as a direct consequence of post-publication peer review (PPPR). In essence, this phenomenon states that even if a million white swans are sighted, the sighting of a single black swan eliminates the veracity of the hypothesis that all swans are white. According to Taleb, it acts as a triplet: a rarity or an outlier, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability, indicating that “the occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one”. Human nature will attempt to try and explain, or rationalize, how a highly improbable event could have occurred. As PPPR examines more and more papers from the already published literature (Teixeira da Silva 2015a, 2015b), and discovers more and more errors that filtered through what was previously thought to be a fail-safe and impervious peer review system (Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2015), the number of exceptions that annul the rule are increasing. This then begs the question: Are “black swan ” events increasingly taking place in science publishing? I claim that yes, and hope to use these few pages to show the rationale why, with a focus on plant science. To achieve this, I have carefully selected several of Taleb’s words and ideas to base my argument. To charter my thoughts, I decided to select four respectable journals in the plant sciences. The first is Scienti