Incentives in Academic Research
msoos.orgWe can be more specific than "the incentives are wrong in Academia", because we know what the incentive is: it's peer-review.
The problem is that today's peer review, while better than nothing, is far from a perfect judge of research quality. If peer-review was a perfect judge of research quality, there would be no incentive problem. The incentives would be aligned.
I happen to be working on an improvement to peer review. An early prototype can be viewed at https://peeryview.org/about. Holler at me if you're also working on this problem!
There is a great blog post [0] that sohl dickstein had a couple years ago, about what happens when the metric being optimized is only a proxy for the thing you want to maximize — what happens eventually is “overfitting”. The original metric (which we cannot directly optimize for) actually starts to get worse.
I believe publishing papers and citations are those proxy metrics.
[0] https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
What I am seeing is not people not being diligent in their research, but people not being diligent in their reviewing of research. But maybe there is a positive feedback loop here...
Sounds a lot like the incentives for making a software change / PR or whatever at BigCo...
Publish a PR that has the word "fix" in the description, get it approved, release it to prod... you are the hero, took action, will get promoted, etc.
When it turns out that the "fix" makes everything worse... well, that's everyone _else's_ problem, like whichever users run into that change blowing up, whoever is on support that day, whoever has to undo it.
The old... "concentrated benefits and diffuse costs" problem.
I think everyone who enters academia goes through this phase of disillusionment. This thing you revered so much as this temple of knowledge turns out to involve the same kind of human business you see anywhere else, with petty fights, little cliques opposing each other, grudges, backscratching, quid pro quo etc etc.
I think once you come to terms with this, you come out on the other side realizing that this is nothing new. The idealized version never existed. What's new is the scale and all the quantitative metrics regarding publication.
> Academic research was meant to be about breaking new ground, keeping to honesty and good scientific conduct, being clear and upfront about uncertainties, errors, and mistakes, and improving our common understanding of science, all the while training the new generation to follow these goals and principles.
This is a naive idealism. Research takes effort and someone has to pay. Sometimes this someone's may profess beliefs that they only want to sponsor unrestricted objective inquiry, but everyone has biases and in an iterated game, soft preferences will be gamed too. In other words, there's is always an effect of "the one who pays orders the song".
The one who pays wants results. He wants prestige through the sponsored project. He doesn't want the researcher to just sit in a room and fail to generate results for years. He wants the researcher to have groundbreaking results. What they are matters less than that they be impressive and improve prestige of the funding source, among peers (in case of nobility funding it), or among the political classes (when government funds it), or to improve the PR and make the sponsor look good and charitable (if a company funds it as a sort of donation to academia).
Much of this "reward" that accrues to the funder does not really depend on the technical content of the work, only inasmuch as such quality was necessary to convince the research community to designate the work as impressive. However if this designation can be helped along via other paths, ie the quid pro quo and backscratching networks, that can be just as good for the funder as long as it doesn't rise to the level of fraud or something that may really damage the reputation.
Always,always follow the money and follow the chain of decisions.
Who will feel good at a cocktail party among their social peers when some impressive research result happens? Who can puff up their chest and say "We paid for that! Look how awesome we are!" and when they summarize the result in a soundbite will it impress their social peers?
This is not only applicable to the actual funding provider but also other orgs in the chain like university administration who provide facilities to the lab etc.
> I think everyone who enters academia goes through this phase of disillusionment. This thing you revered so much as this temple of knowledge turns out to involve the same kind of human business you see anywhere else
My experience and disillusionment is different from yours. I was inspired to do research from nerdy blog posts from researchers in my field. And my experience has mostly been that people in my field are honest, hard working, genuinely interested in doing their research as well as possible – mostly to satisfy their curiosity and sharing their findings with others. Any disillusion I have experienced has been about the fact that doing research is more or less something they squeeze in between teaching, applying for money and administrative tasks.
What point are you trying to make? The quote says "it should be like this", and your snide response is "yeah but it's not like that". Obviously it's not, that's the whole impetus for the post. Maybe learn about positive and normative statements before going off on a rant.
I see the author's point but I respectfully disagree. If anything, there is now much more pressure to make sure the research is error-free because so many people independently look at it. In the past if you found an error in published research, you had limited ways to share your findings. Most journals are reluctant to put their papers under scanner. Now we can just write a blog or tweet out the findings. The researchers today face much more scrutiny compared to the ones in the past. In economics, people are using AI to replicate older famous papers and reporting problems with them. Tools like refine.ink can help researchers identify the errors in their research before even submitting the paper anywhere for a peer review.
Error-free is not the goal, which is the author's point. Citation metrics and grant funding chasing mean the goal is not to be error free but attention grabbing, sensational, a step towards getting a big fat grant or even error filled so other people are forced to tackle the problem and cite you
While I agree with the points raised about incentives, the logic is once again in the antagonistic camp and even plain wrong (cf. if they only would be "afraid of having their careers damaged"). No.
That is: the problems are in the system.
Better: if not plain fraud, the "faulty" papers should stay where they are, and editors (or conference chairs, etc.) should encourage follow-ups (incl. replications, commentaries, and whatever), which, with "modern" technology, could be linked to the papers.
It's very rarely worth damaging your career prospects by picking a fight like this, especially if the other side has good standing in the research community network with powerful allies. I understand the romantic ideal of the hero uncovering bad science, but there is just too much mediocre research out there to spend energy on. Peer review is supposed to catch the biggest errors, but it's very imperfect. After that, only huge landmark results may be worth attacking, because there will be a bigger audience who will be interested in the truth. If it's a niche thing, nobody will care and you just hurt yourself by not focusing on your own work and by making enemies.
What people typically do is just to ignore bad research, and withhold praise, and do their own research in a better direction.
It's a fine line. Fraud? No, they are just sloppy, and so one questions whether they ought to be amended, retracted, or a note by the editor attached. The solution you propose, about a follow-up paper is that who will accept a paper that simply demonstrates that the original work was so full of bugs/issues/misconceptions, that many/most of the claims of the paper don't hold? Would you accept that paper into a top-rated conference? And if it's in a 2nd or 3rd rate conference, wouldn't most people question it authenticity (remember, 2nd and 3rd rate conferences have less rigor in reviews) or simply not hear about it? I think these are legitimate concerns.
A slightly sad side-effect of the follow-up-paper idea, is that it sometimes means that the authors get one more citation, and furthermore, since some of the authors may themselves write part of it, it would mean even more papers by the authors, potentially further cited. So we may be unfortunately incentivizing sloppy research -- the authors can now make two papers: one sloppy, and one fixed. Not sure that's great.
I am not saying what you are proposing is wrong. But it has side-effects that are not great.
What’s the difference between sloppiness and fraud when you stand behind the paper all the same? I would argue that sloppiness in academia is a form of fraud. It’s one thing to be bad at writing, and another to have poor methodology