>Krumholz: There are lot of people who feel the research they do is the best research. It comes across as self-serving and absurd. Science is about replicating and testing your work. We need scientists to test and investigate and provide new insights. … Remember, people may make errors and the only way to catch mistakes and make corrections is to see the data.To call people parasites who are taking advantage of existing data and using that to generate new knowledge is not parasitism. That’s synergy and building on work of others. … Anyone who holds that view is not seeing the big picture about how different people can work in different ways to help society advance.
There's been a lot of anger at NEJM for this editorial, largely because it used the brazenly derogatory term "research parasites," more than any other particular complaint. The same discussion happened last decade in the basic research community, as gene expression microarray studies started publishing lots of data, and no single initial publication could fully mine it. Now that the clinical science community is encountering more of this, and information dense technologies are being used to gather data during clinical trials, the same discussion is getting rehashed.
Meanwhile, those whose primary research thrust is analysis of data rather than generation often have more offers to collaborate than they could ever meet. They may not get the Science or Nature papers though, as those are typically reserved for data producers.