
Rise in Scientific Journal Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform - iProject
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific-journal-retractions-prompts-calls-for-reform.html?ref=science
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paged90
This is a critical problem in the Scientific realm right now. Too much
emphasis is placed on research that breaks ground - and not nearly enough is
put on research that simply didn't work.

For example, suppose I have a hypothesis, and I test it out. To fully reject
that hypothesis I might expend a year of lab time. This results in a year
'wasted' if I found no result, and expected one (an alternative would be you
got no result and it was surprising - thus you found something exciting, but
often this isn't the case).

This is a year wasted for me, but with so many labs focusing on the same
areas, it means that many can double up in their 'time-wasting' endeavours.
This effectively means labs are trying the same hypothesis and failing,
wasting cumulative time on the same dead-end questions.

Every piece of research is a vital piece of an ever-growing puzzle that helps
us deduce exactly what is going on. Unfortunately it seems focus has centered
on those discoveries that 'cure cancer' or 'find the answer to immortality'.
There needs to be a massive re-haul on the way we treat research.

Quality research is quality research - regardless of the results it garners.

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greeneggs
"Quality research is quality research - regardless of the results it garners."

Not true. Research with a negative outcome is less valuable. It creates less
knowledge, because there are many more negative statements you can say about
how things work than positive statements. Negative statements are more trivial
than "vital."

Failed research projects are a combination of bad luck and bad planning, and
you can't separate out these components. Even if more failed projects are
published (further stressing the peer-review system), nobody's going to get a
job based on a failed experiment.

And what evidence do you have that this is a problem? Or that this is more of
a problem than before? Even if so, "a massive re-haul on the way we treat
research" is not the solution; better networking would be enough to avoid
duplicated efforts.

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rflrob
" The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its
retraction rate."

This is not necessarily evidence of misconduct, however. High impact journals
also tend to publish new techniques and surprising results, both of which are
more likely to contain subtle, unintentional errors.

I haven't been in science long enough to say whether the pressures really are
getting worse over time, but my sense is that it's almost always been pretty
competitive.

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w1ntermute
> Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete
> for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973,
> more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of
> getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent.

That's why the smart thing to do is to take yourself out of the competition -
go into the industry. The whole idea of "science for science's sake" doesn't
work when each professor advises a dozen PhD students over his career - the
majority of those students _have_ to go somewhere outside academia, and
industry is the obvious (and only other) choice.

~~~
sien
Which is what many of them do. This graph gives people an idea of what
happens:

[http://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2010/11/02/your-
scien...](http://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2010/11/02/your-science-in-
seven-words/career-pathway/)

The next question is whether it's worth doing a PhD for the 2/3 people who
don't work in Academia. Perhaps it is.

~~~
w1ntermute
> The next question is whether it's worth doing a PhD for the 2/3 people who
> don't work in Academia. Perhaps it is.

I think this actually depends on your field. Basically, it's a matter of
running the numbers - if the difference between the increase in income and the
cost of grad school for you (both loss of income and the effort required) is
significantly greater than 0 - go for it.

