WIKIMEDIA, WARBURGThe more that scientists focus on awards and advertise career-building, the more that we, as a community, attract people seeking prizes and glamorous careers, and the bigger the burden on the peer review system. The independent and critical assessment of data and of analysis is at the core of our profession. Yet, the rapid growth of the scientific enterprise and the explosion of the scientific literature have made it all but impossible to read, think deeply, and assess independently even the subset of all published papers that is relevant to one’s research. This is alarming.
Here I suggest an approach to alleviating the problem, starting with two related questions: Why is low-quality “science” written up and submitted for publication, and what can we do to curb such submissions? These questions touch on the difficult-to-quantify subject of human motivation. Scientists have a complex set of incentives that include understanding nature, developing innovating solutions to important problems, and aspirations of heightened social status, prestige, and successful careers. These incentives have always existed and always will.
Scientific culture can powerfully affect the incentives of scientists and in the process harness the independent thought of the individual scientists—not only the external reviewers—in raising the standards and rigors of their work. I see a culture focused on prizes and career-building as inimical to science. If ...
