A very pessimistic view on the state of research quality in the US, particularly in public health research. Some choice quotes:
My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.
Yet, more importantly, training in “science” is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodological rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts.
From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct.
The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor.
academic research is often “conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.” In other words, taxpayers fund studies that are conducted for non-scientific reasons such as career advancement
Incompetence in concert with a lack of accountability and political or personal agendas has grave consequences: *The Economist* stated that from 2000 to 2010, nearly 80,000 patients were involved in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted.
Still, there the author says there is hope for reform. The last three paragraphs suggest abolishing overheads, have limits on the number of grants received by and the maximum age of PIs, and preventing the use of public funding for publicity.
Thanks for elaborating Will.
Agreed that the increase in funding for science will generally just increase the size of science, and the base assumption should be that the retraction rate will stay the same, which would lead to a roughly proportionate increase in the number of retractions with science funding. The 700% vs. 900% roughly agrees with that assumption (although it could still be that the reasons for retraction change over time).
The idea of increasing retractions being a beneficial sign of better epistemic standards is interesting. My observation is that papers are usually basically only retracted if scientific fraud or misconduct was committed (e.g. falsifying or manipulating research data) - questionable research practices (e.g. P-hacking, optional stopping or HARKing), failure to replicate, or even technical errors don't usually lead to a retraction (Wikipedia also notes that plagiarism is a common cause of retractions). It is a pity there is no ground truth for scientific misconduct to reference the retraction rate against.
Aside, this summary of the influence of retractions and failure to replicate on later citations may be of interest. Thankfully, retraction usually has a strong reduction on the amount of citations the retracted paper receives.