Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

The journals, too, should adopt new standards that promote openness and replicability: explicitly inviting scientists to submit replications, to pre-register their plans, and to attach their datasets to their papers would be a great start.104 This extends the list of ways in which scientists can endear their paper to journal editors beyond the narrow focus on positive studies and means that researchers with null results won’t give up at the first hurdle.105 Journals could also institute policies of scanning studies for basic errors or employ data integrity officers to do random spot checks using methods like the GRIM test.106 They should certainly push authors to present their findings with humility: just as they require scientists to disclose their conflicts of interest, they could require them to write a ‘study limitations’ section that’s displayed in a little box on the final published paper.107 They could even try to discourage salami-slicing by making it more costly (in terms of time, effort, or money) to submit papers.108