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The recent explosion in the number of retractions in scientific journals is just the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of a greater dysfunction that has been evolving the world of biomedical research say the editors-in-chief of two prominent journals in a presentation before a committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) today.
"Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science," says Ferric Fang, editor-in-chief of the journal
Infection and Immunity, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), who is speaking today at the meeting of the Committee of Science, Technology, and Law of the NAS along with Arturo Casadevall, editor-in-chief of mBio®, the ASM's online, open-access journal.
In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%. While retractions still represent a very small percentage of the total, the increase is still disturbing because it undermines society's confidence in scientific results and on public policy decisions that are based on those results, says Casadevall. Some of the retractions are due to simple error but many are a result of
misconduct including falsification of data and plagiarism.More concerning, say the editors, is that this trend may be a symptom of a growing dysfunction in the biomedical sciences, one that needs to be addressed soon. At the heart of the problem is an
economic incentive system fueling a hypercompetitive environment that is fostering poor scientific practices, including frank misconduct.
The root of the problem is a lack of sufficient resources to sustain the current enterprise. Too many researchers are competing for too little funding, creating a survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all environment where researchers increasingly feel pressure to publish, especially in high-prestige journals.
"The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high profile journal," says Fang. "This is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior to salvage their career."
Funding is just one aspect of a very complex problem Casadevall and Fang see growing in the biomedical sciences. In a series of editorials in the journal
Infection and Immunity they describe their views in detail, arguing that science is not as healthy as it could be or as it needs to be to effectively address the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.
"Incentives in the current system place scientists under tremendous stress, discourage cooperation, encourage poor scientific practices and deter new talent from entering the field," they write. "It is time for a discussion of how the scientific enterprise can be reformed to become more effective and robust."
The answers, they write, must come not only from within the scientific community but from society as a whole that has helped create the current incentive structure that is fostering the dysfunction. In the editorials they outline a series of recommended reforms including methodological, cultural and structural changes.
"In the end, it is not the number of high-impact-factor papers, prizes or grant dollars that matters most, but the joys of discovery and the innumerable contributions both large and small that one makes through contact with other scientists," they write. "Only science can provide solutions to many of the most urgent needs of contemporary society. A conversation on how to reform science should begin now."
Copies of the Infection and Immunity editorials can be found online
here and
here.
The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single life science society, composed of over 39,000 scientists and health professionals. ASM's mission is to advance the microbiological sciences as a vehicle for understanding life processes and to apply and communicate this knowledge for the improvement of health and environmental and economic well-being worldwide.
productions are bought and sold through fear of non-advancement and fear of reprisal at most Tier I universities. Anyone with the eyes to see can see this. Academic freedom and open-mindedness died with the death of a truly liberal, universal education centuries ago. It is nothing more than, as Robert Pirsig called it, a "Church of Reason:" nothing but dogma these days with little substance. University campuses are fully branded in the monetized disciplines of Natural and Cultural Sciences. Look at the placards outside of entry points to all Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology buildings.
As an idealistic graduate student, I challenged a visiting scholar regarding omissions in a presentation given regarding the Nature of Science. The dinner-time challenge concerned the seemingly purposeful exclusion of a treatment of the contemporary mechanisms for funding of graduate educations, academic grants, journals and research laboratory within a broad talk he had given our faculty and students concerning contemporary science and science education. His solution was to swig his beer while brandishing a countenance appearing disdainful. Then, he ranted about subject/object unity and various aspects of phenomenology, making a self-perpetuated self out of intellectual tiddly-winks. He also refrained from eye-contact, knowing - I suspect - in his heart of hearts that he was known by me at a level he did not wish to be known. Embarrassed, ashamed or otherwise pull out of his intellectual recess, I do not know.
It seems to me that there is little science where a "science" is taught, at least within a sphere of education espousing - whether deliberately or not - egoistic influences and conditions as a cause for construction of knowledge (i.e. fear induced, reactionary self constructing of a self and what it "knows"). Science is, or can be, an art encompassing the right relating of self to and as within process of understanding, knowing and relating to the broader world through us and around us. It is a relationship; and, the fundamental error of the last 400 or more years within science and elsewhere has been a failure to take responsibility for the abstract selves created in the course relational interchange of parts of a whole. We have become nouns doing science (or whatever), rather than verbs being science (or whatever). This is, whether intentioned or not, key to the control of a profound human intellectual, psychological, sociological and spiritual heritage. There is reason for fear-based psychologies inhabiting research campuses.