Konsensus ilmiah adalah penilaian kolektif, posisi, dan pendapat komunitasilmuwan dalam bidang studi tertentu. Konsensus menyiratkan kesepakatan umum, meskipun tidak harus dengan suara bulat.[1]
Debat populer atau politis mengenai suatu subjek yang kontroversial dalam ruang publik, tetapi belum tentu sebagai subjek kontroversial dalam komunitas ilmiah dapat menimbulkan konsensus ilmiah, seperti topik evolusi,[7][8]perubahan iklim,[9] atau kontroversi vaksin MMR.[6]
^Ford, Michael (2008). "Disciplinary authority and accountability in scientific practice and learning"(PDF). Science Education. 92 (3): 409. Bibcode:2008SciEd..92..404F. doi:10.1002/sce.20263. Construction of scientific knowledge is first of all public, a collaborative effort among a community of peers working in a particular area. 'Collaborative' may seem a misnomer because individual scientists compete with each other in their debates about new knowledge claims. Yet this sense of collaboration is important: it checks individual scientists from being given authority for new knowledge claims prematurely.
^Horstmann, K. T., & Ziegler, M. (2016). Situational Perception: Its Theoretical Foundation, Assessment, and Links to Personality. In U. Kumar (Ed.), The Wiley Handbook of Personality Assessment (1st ed., pp. 31–43). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. ("In Personality Assessment, Walter Mischel focused on the instability of personality and claimed that it is nearly impossible to predict behavior with personality (Mischel, 1968, 2009). This led to the person-situation debate, a controversy in psychology that sought to answer the question whether behavior depended more on the subject’s personality or the situation (or both) and has received considerable research attention (Webster, 2009).")