Scientists trust what they think they can verify.

In principle, you can work your way through the proof of every mathematical theorem. With enough money and time, you could replicate every experiment. For every expert opinion, you could dig through the literature and find how it was justified.

And while a scientist can’t actually do that for every field, they might be able to for the ones they care about most. In your specialty, you probably can check the logic behind every claim. And you know that enough people try, that you can trust your colleagues’ work.

As a science journalist, most of the time, you can’t do those checks. You don’t even pretend you can. Instead, you build trust, like a tree.

You start with a grounding. A former scientist might trust their former colleagues, people they trusted, as a scientist, to do (and know) good work. A non-scientist has to start somewhere else. They might use prestige, looking up those tenured folks at Harvard or Princeton or Stanford. They might look to who other journalists trusted, scientists who’ve already been in the news. They might track journals or roles, assuming that a publication in Nature, or a position on a national grant committee, has a special meaning.

And if things stopped there, it would be a pretty elitist system. It still can be, and often is. But there is another step, which softens it.

The trust builds.

When I want to know if a paper in an unfamiliar field makes sense, if it’s worth covering, I try to ask someone I trust. Sometimes, they don’t know, and shrug. Other, more useful, times, they don’t know, but they have a suggestion: someone they trust, who can give me the answer.

And so I ask the new person, and now I trust someone more.

And suppose the new person says the new paper is good, and worth covering, good science and all that jazz.

Well, now I can trust its authors too, right?

So when the next paper comes, I now don’t just have that first someone. I have the person they recommended, and the authors of the previous paper.

The trust builds out, and up, like branches on a tree.