Verification Is Hard in Interdisciplinary Science

Verifying whether a scientific result is reliable is increasingly difficult because science is becoming highly interdisciplinary and networked, so a journalist can no longer just hand a paper to a couple of experts—those experts may know only one side of the field, may lack the statistical skills, or, worst case, an entire field may be in collusion with a received line of thinking (such as priming researchers all buying into the same concept).