John M.

ScienceDaily is the only comprehensive source for real science news that I have found on the internet. It is free but comes with the usual "personalized" advertising, occasionally to such an extent that pages fail to load. However, the news is based on "materials" (news releases in some cases, rather than abstracts) provided by the journals, universities, or other entities (this is sometimes noted at the bottom of the report), and the ScienceDaily editorial staff doesn't seem willing or able to fill in the gaps. What does that mean? In practice, it is common for a report on some biological topic to omit any mention of what species, enzyme, gene, etc. was actually used in the experiments! While we can understand that researchers may sometimes need to conceal trade secrets, such as the exact molecular structure of a drug candidate, there is seldom any excuse for leaving out the identity of the organism that was the subject of the experiments!

It is important for the reader to realize that not all of the reports on the ScienceDaily web site can properly be considered "news". Sometimes the story turns out to be nothing but a thought experiment, a preliminary report, or a report of preparations for a line of inquiry, or a report of an actual experiment that cannot be evaluated because too many details have been left out. While these limitations should be obvious to anyone with scientific training, I have to wonder if the public at large may have difficulty assigning an appropriate degree of importance or reliability to the diverse materials that are all reported under the banner of "Science".