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 Gavin.
I'd be interested in seeing data on the distribution of causes of retraction and how it's changed over time. I know RetractionWatch likes to say that scientists tend to underestimate the proportion of retractions that are down to fraud. I do think some (many?) retractions are due to serious technical errors with no implication of deliberate fraud or misconduct. I suspect RetractionWatch has data on this.
I'm not claiming that it's inevitably true that more retractions indicates better community epistemics, but I do think it's a big part of the story in this case. A paper retraction requires someone to notice that the paper is worthy of retraction, bring that to the editors and, very often, put a lot of pressure on the editors to retract the paper (who are usually extremely reluctant to do so). That requires people to be on the lookout for things that might need to be retracted and willing to put in the time and effort to get it retracted.
In the past this was very rare, and only extremely flagrant fraud or misconduct (or unusually honest scientists retracting their own work) led to retractions. Now, partly as a side consequence of the replication crisis but also more general (and incomplete) changes in norms, we have a lot more people who spend a lot of time actively searching for data manipulation and other retraction-worthy things in papers.
This is just the science version of the common claim that a recorded increase (or decrease) in the rate of a particular crime, or a particular mental disorder, or some such, is mainly due to changes in how closely we're looking for it.