Distorted science

Is the system used to publish scientific and medical research doing a disservice to science?

According to an editorial published this week in PLoS Medicine, the answer is yes.

By applying economic principles to publication practices, a team of researchers call attention to the “extreme imbalance” between the growing supply of data generated in laboratories and clinical settings and the “increasingly limited venues” for publication in high impact journals. This imbalance, the authors argue, leads publications to fail to represent “scientists’ repeated samplings of the real world,” further reducing the diversity of scientific exploration.

“Science is subject of great uncertainty: we cannot be confident now which efforts will ultimately yield worthwhile achievements,” the authors write. “However, the current system abdicates an authoritative prescience to anticipate a highly unpredictable future.”

The authors argue it is time to reevaluate how scientific data are judged and disseminated. What do you think?

Jennifer, Intern, The Scientist

My position is an unequivocal yes, it is distorted. The journals rely on a very select refereeing board as they know this maintains their prominence. The world of muscle physiology has had incorrect dogma for 40+ years and has precluded publication of major advances in peer reviewed journals. In the need to nail my flag to the mast I had to pay to publish as a book with ISBN. In the end I know I will get the recognition but not being in a journal refereed by the establishment the studies are being ignored. When many more have died from congenital heart disease over the next few years none of the journal editors or their boards of referees will be afforded any blame. In fact it is tantamount to murder! The improvement of drugs such as Levosimendan will not happen until my work is accepted. In preventing my publishing in noted journals the powers-that-be have committed a very dishonorable act just to prevent acknowledging that they have missed the obvious. I am not religeous but doesn't pride get a mention somewhere.

Anyone who wishes to take on board the true nature of stimulus contraction coupling should read my book, although they will need to understand a lot of basic chemical kinetics as well as cardiac function. Do a google for "new concepts in the control of muscle contraction"

PS I wish the uncertain nature of biological science was not always extended to the application of physico-chemical principles which have a tendency to be certain, provided they are applied by someone who knows the ropes. Try counting and comparing the density of the thin and thick filaments in various parts of the mammalian muscle, there is a vast amount of published data to use. The biologists are so unsure that that ignore a physically certain factor of twofold discrepancy.

I think that there are some short comings in the system. They are linked to both the peer reviewing process, but also I think that too many journals (basically all these days) focus on brand new science. I think that many studies would benefit from being redone either as they are, but in other labs, or in other organisms. I don't know of any journals (to be fair I haven't looked) where it is possible to publish 'attachments' to already published papers listing relevant repeats of core experiments. Working with plants for instance, there can be a huge difference in observed phenotypes just based on changing a single parameter slightly. These kinds of observations would help all, but are very difficult to publish as they seem to contradict what has already been published. I would love to see journals opening up for possibilities like this.

I think that this PLOS Medicine editorial expresses what everyone has known for (at least) decades, using the unfamiliar concept of the "winner's curse" to present it in a novel way. When scientists are driven into a game of competition for prestige, many bad things happen: results are trimmed to pass reviewers favoring current dogma and papers are handed over to particularly prominent commercial journals and restricted from public view by copyrights. But perhaps the most pervasive problem is simply that some people win. We end up with fairly many prominent professors earning substantial salaries, while the work is done largely by people formally regarded as being in training. What we lose is the opportunity to hire a larger number of fairly independent researchers earning lower pay and under less pressure, able to do research on a more equal footing with one another. Of course, this last problem is not unique to science, but reflects an American culture that has become increasingly stratified and has been losing its middle class, even though we know that this will be less productive in the long term.