There needs to be adequate due diligence, especially when selecting and approaching potential peer reviewers. This shouldn’t need to be said, but the fake peer review cases have thrown up many instances where this hasn’t occurred. I was shocked back in 2012 when the first cases came to light, and now that over 500 retractions due to fake reviews have been reported by Retraction Watch, I’m quite stunned.
h/t Rolf
This is one of the flaws of the entire research system. One needs to produce publications in order to get funding, to be hired for a faculty position, and to be even considered for tenure.
The system requires not just publications but large numbers of them. It’s taken as the sole measure of a researcher’s productivity, regardless of how much time it takes to set up one’s experiment or model as well as produce and analyze the data that’s produced.
Because of this, there are some who take shortcuts. That was a problem the first time I was a grad student more than 35 years ago. Back then, those shortcuts were simply filching someone else’s results and passing them off as one’s own.
“This is a key feature of high-quality peer review, and not only helps authors improve/rescue their current paper, but also can guide the direction of their research, and so help the research and scholarly efforts of a discipline”. Irene Hames
It is a true fact that a critical review does more GOOD than all the glad handing. It is the ideas from those that don’t agree that help move the boundary of science research…Not a trivial issue
JMHO
In my experience, I’ve found, unfortunately, that the system is intellectually root-bound.
Originality is frowned upon, if not punished, as it undermines the consensus. (Now where have we heard that before, hmmmmmmm?)
In addition, originality can jeopardize the chances that one’s research can be financially supported. Since universities are little more than money-harvesting operations, anything that threatens a potential source of revenue is discouraged. The result is that academics tend to investigate topics that are safe and which have a higher chance of producing publishable results, and producing those data much quicker.
Tales of the maverick researcher who bucks the system and is eventually found to have been right are largely that. They’re nice stories but those situations seldom occur and, rarer still, end nicely.
I’m sure that there have been cases where a renowned researcher didn’t want to be scooped by a relative unknown or, for that matter, a talented rookie and that researcher made sure that the other party’s results were published later. That can be accomplished by ensuring that the other party’s paper is delayed in the review process and, yes, the “deficiencies” can be quite petty, such as, say, not having the right font on a graph. The renowned researcher then produces a publication, which, by virtue of his or her reputation, is quickly reviewed, resulting in awards or funding. The other person gets whatever crumbs that are left over, if any.
yup, money harvesting and EGO stroking, is what much of it is about. Stop government grants, and let the chips fall were they may
Peer review is akin to Trixie the democrat getting three of her girl friends to agree that her Tesla can jump the Grand Canyon.
Originality is frowned upon, if not punished, as it undermines the consensus.
Well I am a researcher, and that is nonsense. Originality is valued and rewarded. It can’t be “transgressive” just for the sake of trangressity (new word). You have to make a solid case based on evidence, analysis, and logic. But those who manage it are celebrated.
Well I am a researcher, and that is nonsense
So am I and I know what I’m talking about. I first encountered that as a grad student nearly 40 years ago.
Originality is valued and rewarded.
If nobody understands it or, for that matter, wants to, one’s prospects for a career are severely reduced.
You have to make a solid case based on evidence, analysis, and logic. But those who manage it are celebrated.
And if that “evidence, analysis, and logic” aren’t accepted? There are numerous examples throughout history where someone had an original idea, presented solid arguments in favour of it and had nothing but grief as a result.
If someone wants to have a successful research career, one dare not step off the path but, if one insists on doing so, it’s best not to go too far from it. The “community” becomes rather uncomfortable with that.
If no one understands the work then either it doesn’t make sense or the researchers can’t communicate.
There are some examples, and we know about them today because those researchers are now celebrated. Occasionally it just takes time. But in the grand scheme of things, such examples are very rare.
There are far, far more examples where a work wasn’t accepted because it didn’t deserve to be. Being transgressive doesn’t automatically make something correct.
If no one understands the work then either it doesn’t make sense or the researchers can’t communicate.
Or they can’t be bothered to try to understand it. During my Ph. D. defence, I could tell who actually read my thesis, let alone understood what I was saying in it.
There are some examples, and we know about them today because those researchers are now celebrated.
Only because there was subsequent evidence supporting the original idea.
Occasionally it just takes time.
In Galileo’s case, that didn’t happen until after his death. Similarly, Alfred Wegner as regarded as a crank after he proposed the idea of continental drift. It wasn’t until some 30 years or so after he died that the phenomenon behind it, namely plate tectonics, was understood and described. Even then, it was met with skepticism.
But in the grand scheme of things, such examples are very rare.
Uh, no. From what I understand, Copernicus’s book wasn’t published until after his death because he knew that his ideas were controversial. Newton constantly bickered with Sir Robert Hooke because he didn’t follow the scientific convention of his day.
“Transgressity” showed up in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in July 2010.
I’m sure they were discussing the emergence of spines from the primordial peer review (read mutual masturbation) ooze. The high CO2 level was noted as a contributing factor. /sark
http://library.dmr.go.th/Document/E-Content/Journals/Journal%20of%20Vertebrate%20Paleontology/2010/VerPal_2010_Vol30_No4.pdf
You’re citing Galileo and Copernicus in a discussion about the current state of science? At least you could have gone for Alfred Wegener — you know, something in the last 100 years.
You’re citing Galileo and Copernicus in a discussion about the current state of science?
Yes, because the mentality of the scientific status quo hasn’t changed a great deal since then.
Nowadays, it’s play along or one doesn’t get funding; conform or no tenure. Questioning the orthodoxy has consequences if one wants a place in the system.
It’s all about the headline. How often does the retraction make the front page?
https://kek.gg/i/6grxdh.jpg
Yes, because the mentality of the scientific status quo hasn’t changed a great deal since then.
I can’t express how preposterous that is. No one won a Nobel Prize in science for preserving the status quo. Newton, Maxwell, Plank, Einstein, Feynman — these names are famous for overturning the apple cart.
The exceptions prove the rule…
Einstein never faced any opposition, did he? So how to you explain “!00 Scientists Against Einstein”? Edwin Hubbell? He only suggested that the “island universes” that astronomers observed were located outside the Milky Way galaxies and were, in fact, galaxies themselves. Many of his fellow astronomers thought he was nuts.
Oh, yes, let’s not forget Fred Hoyle. He went against the consensus model of the Big Bang and suggested that the universe was steady-state. He didn’t make too many friends.
Also, Thomas Gold had a habit of being an irritant by going against the grain. I remember when he suggested that petroleum came from deep inside the earth’s crust. That idea was tested through an attempt to drill at a site somewhere in northern Scandanavia. They didn’t strike oil but there were some interesting indications that Gold wasn’t entirely out in left field.
There’s a reason why Fritz Zwicky referred to his astronomical colleagues as “spherical b**tards”.
The vast majority of researchers are hardly movers and shakers. Most simply do it to make a living and they have to dance to whatever tune the funding sources play for them. Most have bosses they have to answer to and those bosses determine whether those researchers are toeing the line properly and, thereby, get to keep their jobs.
Research which, as you put it, “upsets the apple cart” is risky and is rarely funded as there’s a low probability of success.
Industrial research is concerned only with quick and easy results which can be converted into revenue.
Government research tends to be open-ended but the investigators expect to get every bell and whistle they want, though they can’t accept the fact that there are such things as budgets. Deadlines remarkably acquire elastic properties in that setting.
Academic research often combines the worst aspects of what’s done in industry and government. Often, it seems, professors aren’t too particular what they investigate so long as someone else is paying for it. It’s as if they are deliberately creating work for themselves to justify their paycheques.
If one wants to be completely independent as a researcher, one either needs to have the right kind of friends or be financially independent. Few people have either.
Of course Einstein faced “competition”. All radical scientific ideas are challenged, just as they should be. That’s how we find out which model most faithfully resembles reality.
But within a year of Einstein publishing his first papers on special relativity, Max Plank, one of the most respected physicists of that era, began writing papers based on it. Within two years, Plank had his graduate students doing the same.
Considering how revolutionary, unsettling, and counter-intuitive special relativity was — Einstein, after all, overturned Newtonian physics — the broad acceptance of special relativity among physicists was remarkable. There were some older physicists who never came to accept it, but in an astonishingly short time the most relevant young physicists of the day did.
You want perfection? Ain’t gonna happen. Scientists are human. But the sciences have proven repeatedly that radical ideas will be accepted if the case for them is strong enough.
It wasn’t until the 1919 solar eclipse and Eddington’s observations that relativity was accorded some validity by physicists at large.
It’s a popular misconception that Einstein overturned Newtonian physics. He did nothing of the sort. Newton’s laws of motion still describe how bodies move in general. For example, they’re used for orbital mechanics and calculating spacecraft trajectories. However, they fall short in accurately describing what occurs at the subatomic scale or near massive objects.
Newton knew of only 2 forces: gravitation and coulombic attraction. The fact that atoms consist of smaller particles and that there existed strong and weak nuclear forces would never have occurred to him as there was no way he would have even known about them. Those laws of motion adequately described how bodies moved in the universe as Newton and his peers understood it and they still do for most purposes.
Einstein, however, extrapolated from what Newton did to obtain a general description of motion, in part due to discoveries and observations made in the 200 or so years after the original equations were derived.
As for “radical ideas will be accepted if the case for them is strong enough“, those ideas will continue to be met with skepticism until they can be examined and, better yet, verified. Evidence will be required to support them and that might not be immediately possible, if at all, unless there is a means by which they can be tested by additional theory or observation. Often, supplementary data will be required in order to interpret the concept. By then, those “radical” ideas will seem to be much more sensible and even logical.
Without that, those “radical” ideas will be seen as claptrap.
It continually amazes me how some researchers come up with certain concepts and build on them, even though those concepts have never been demonstrated to be true.
Dark matter is an example of that. A lot of research is being done on the basis of it actually existing and, yet, no direct observation of it has been made nor has someone actually presented, say, a bucket full of the stuff as evidence that it’s real. Although it nicely explains a number of cosmological phenomena, it strikes me as being little more than a variation on what’s been jokingly called Skinner’s Constant, a number used to get the answer one wants.
Here again, openly expressing doubts about the existence of dark matter may have consequences for someone working in the field.
Incorrect. Eddington’s observations concerned general relativity. Special relativity, however, was widely accepted by German physicists (the world leaders in physics at the time) by 1910.
Incorrect. Newtonian physics are used in many sciences and most day-to-day situations because the error is small for the application. But the error is still there, and Newtonian physics is wrong. Also relativity is sometimes used when calculating the trajectory of spacecraft, especially when the spacecraft come near the sun.