Publish or Perish

“Over time the most successful people will be those who can best exploit the system” — Paul Smaldino of the University of California Merced

You may think that the biggest threat to scientific integrity is fraud, an uncommon practice of fabricating results to get published. However, only about 0.05% of all science publications are fraudulent, making it a very fringe issue. Instead, the problems of scientific integrity are much more endemic and entrenched. They even reach all the way up to the most prestigious journals.

Some recent research found that the most prestigious and respected journals “struggle to reach even average reliability”. In fact, the study found that more prestigious journals tended to be less reliable because their publications were more likely to be sensationalised and misrepresented in order to garner more interest and to seem more groundbreaking. Furthermore, these studies tended to have worse methodologies because researchers are prioritising good outcomes over robust methodologies.

So why would scientists be looking for quick fixes and misrepresenting their data? Today, scientists are pushed to publish as frequently as possible and in the best journals they can in order to sustain their careers, the so called “publish or perish” incentive. Because they are pushed to publish so much and because they are rewarded by journals for having more flashy and interesting results they often choose simple methodologies which will yield the results they want. Worse still, these results are then made to sound more interesting and promising than they really are.

In short, publishing actively biased research is good for scientists, but bad for science.

A positive correlation between bias and research impact retrieved from this article.

Scientists get farther by exploiting the system. There are many good examples of this. Firstly, good science should often lead to inconclusive or negative results, but it is a widely known fact that the majority of studies have positive results. This is known as the publication bias and it has emerged because scientists are incentivized to publish successful studies.

Secondly, many scientists will take money from companies to do research on their products or to do studies which end up having a huge conflict of interest. A good example of this was when the University of Maryland published study into the effects of Quarter Fresh chocolate milk which were funded by the company itself.

Finally, data will often be fudged or drawn into questionable conclusions to make the study seem more impactful than it really is or to make the results positive.

Furthermore, the constant need to “publish or perish” can push scientists to their limits and has been linked to mental health issues for science researchers.

But what about peer review? In any academic paper, submissions are critically inspected by other researchers through a “peer review” to make sure that what’s getting published is good quality science. Ideally this should weed out bad research, but unfortunately this isn’t often the case.