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More is not better: the developing crisis of scientific publishing (poliversity.it)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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More is not better: the developing crisis of scientific publishing

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https://council.science/blog/more-is-not-better-the-developing-crisis-of-scientific-publishing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=more-is-not-better-the-developing-crisis-of-scientific-publishing

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

"Publish or perish" is an expression that's been around since forever and it's well ingrained into every researcher's mind so...

What did society expect?

(Not so) Fun story: when a friend of mine was doing her PhD she was trying really hard to reproduce an experiment published on Nature by two Harvard postdocs at the time. She was so frustrated because she couldn't reproduce it, so she approached one of the authors during a conference and he candidly admitted the experiment was utterly wrong, since after publishing it they realized they made a fatal mistake in interpreting the result which invalidated their claims.

They published the original paper honestly, since they were not aware of the mistake at the time, but they willingly decided not to retract it since a paper in Nature is always a paper in Nature and the citations piling up were too important for their career... How about that for the intellectual honesty that scientists project having as an aura?

Anyhow, this nearly killed my friend's PhD, but luckily she switched to something related she managed to understand and graduated...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

@ConstipatedWatson who knows how many cases like this there are?