The Scientific Evidence Indicator is a tool that draws on publication metadata to help readers of science news judge how strong the evidence behind a claim is. Its designers built it so readers could tell science from pseudoscience, and the metadata it surfaces includes whether a study has been peer-reviewed. An evaluation of the tool found that this part worked: readers became better at identifying peer-reviewed studies. The same evaluation found the tool did not move readers toward a deeper understanding of the evidence itself.
Peer review is one signal among several. A peer-review label answers a single question, whether other researchers have vetted the work, and leaves open how the study was designed, how large it was, and whether anyone has reproduced the result. A tool that reports a label can teach the label. Teaching the reasoning behind it is a different task, and it is the harder one. The authors of the evaluation proposed a route around that limit: aim comparable tools at journalists, who can apply what they learn directly in reporting that reaches many readers.
The International Particle Physics Outreach Group has run a version of that strategy since 1997, when the collaboration formed to popularize particle physics. Its Resource Database has supplied educational material for close to a decade, and it is built for educators and communicators rather than for students or the public directly. A teacher who builds a lesson from the database, or a communicator who reuses an explanation, carries the material to an audience the database itself never addresses. The material is produced once at a controlled level of quality and then reused across many classrooms and outlets.
Two examples show how the intermediary model works in practice, and the SKA Observatory telescopes show why the demand for it will grow. SKA-Low and SKA-Mid pair high sensitivity with wide frequency coverage and many simultaneous beams. For pulsar astronomy each property addresses a separate problem. Sensitivity sets how faint a pulsar can be and still be detected. Frequency coverage sets which pulsars fall within the telescopes' range. Multiple beams allow several directions on the sky to be observed at once, which speeds up searches across large areas. A special issue of The Open Journal of Astrophysics lays out those expectations. The issue is itself peer-reviewed literature, which makes it the kind of source the Scientific Evidence Indicator was built to flag and the kind a reporter has to describe accurately.
The examples point at a shared design choice rather than a shared technology. A tool aimed at the public has to compress the reasoning behind a result into something a reader will accept on the spot, which is where the Scientific Evidence Indicator stalled. A tool aimed at intermediaries can hand over the reasoning and let them apply it repeatedly, to claims the original tool never saw. Intermediaries also sit where correction is possible: a wrong explanation can be revised before it reaches a wide audience. The SKA telescopes will generate results that concern objects and signals most readers have no direct experience of, so the accuracy of the account will rest on the person giving it. The further a finding sits from everyday intuition, the more that dependence matters.
