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

by Stuart Ritchie

Is it right to cast the scientific publication system as some kind of ur-problem that underlies all of the above? Can we truly say that the perverse incentives created by prioritising publications, citations, and grant money have led directly to acts of fraud, bias, negligence, and hype? We can never know for sure what’s going through the mind of a scientist when they commit one of the problematic practices we’ve seen in the preceding chapters. But we can try to make an inference to the best explanation. Scientists are human, and humans respond to incentives. The problems in science that we’ve observed are so widespread, across the world and across scientific disciplines, that they must have an explanation at the level of science’s wider culture: we’re not just talking about a few bad apples ruining science for everyone else. When we look at the overall trends in scientific practice in recent decades – the exponential proliferation of papers; the strong academic selection on publications, citations, h-indices and grants; the obsession with impact factors and with new, exciting results; and the appearance of phenomena like predatory journals, which are of course just catering to a demand – wouldn’t it be strange if we didn’t see such bad behaviour on the part of scientists? Though we shouldn’t stop looking for other explanations – perhaps, for example, the problem lies more with the policing of the system, rather than the incentives themselves – the theory that the publishi...