🚀 go-pugleaf

In the recent flamefest about hydrogen powered automobiles,
several people appeared to be claiming that Scientific American
is a part of the scientific literature.  This point of view
is basically not defensible.  The journal in question does not
use footnotes and does not as a rule run articles disputing the
points of view of previous articles.  Furthermore, it has been 
for many years visible that its articles on some topics appeared 
to share a common set of political biases (a problem shared by
its university press counterpart Technology Review), so in my 
personal opinion its value as a source of information is open to 
some question. 

Under the orthodox definition of a scientific journal, as one whose 
articles are documented in a scholarly way and whose pages are 
generally open to debate, Scientific American (no matter its 
extensive merits as a refined match to Popular Mechanics) is not a 
scientific journal, and publication in its (undoubtedly culturally 
valuable) pages should not be described as publication in the 
scientific literature.  

George Phillies
phillies@wpi.wpi.edu