Arturo Casadevall and Ferric C. Fang want to improve the quality of scientific literature, and along the way make this observation in JCI, a publication of Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine:
vii. Fostering a culture of rigor. In recent decades, many life science researchers have learned to accept a culture of impact, which stresses publication in high-impact journals, flashy claims, and packaging of results into tidy stories. Today, a scientist who publishes incorrect articles in high-impact journals is more likely to enjoy a successful career than one who publishes careful and rigorous studies in lower-impact journals, provided that the publications of the former are not retracted. This misplaced value system creates perverse incentives for scientists to participate in a “tragedy of the commons” that is detrimental to science (17). The culture of impact must be replaced by a culture of rigor that emphasizes quality over quantity. A focus on experimental redundancy, error analysis, logic, appropriate use of statistics, and intellectual honesty can help make research more rigorous and likely to be true (18). The publication of confirmatory or contradictory findings must also be encouraged to allow the scientific literature to provide a more accurate and comprehensive reflection of the body of scientific evidence (19).
For the scientist who values fame and fortune over getting it right, this is a golden observation. However, we shouldn’t depend on the researcher to have irreproachable ethics, but rather to structure the system so they don’t have a choice but to get the research right in order to gain that fortune and fame.
