Too much low-quality content, caused by "publish or perish" and funding that doesn't care about quality of results.
Kudos for retracting. Integrity is probably more important for science, than intelligence (not meant as offense, there are a million reasons a experiment can produce odd one time results).
Too many published results seem to not be reproducible anymore and not many are even trying, as there is little benefit in reconfirming findings, but rather incentive to publish, publish, publish. Quantity over quality it seems. We somehow need to change that again.
Further, the criticism of academia as being full of egg-headed elites who are completely disconnected from the public need has been around for decades - far longer than the current systemic funding and tenure problems.
The public have been bombarded with ridiculous, counter-intuitive "science" for decades, only for a lot of it to be quietly withdrawn or superceded later. It erodes trust.
And that's without taking into consideration the shady corporate-science bullshit like the fat vs sugar debate in nutrition science. If a company can buy a paper that says whatever it wants, and get it peer-reviewed and published in a journal, why would we trust science? Should we even?
In medicine, the Journal of the AMA and the New England Journal of Medicine seem to be the main sources of articles that reach the public's eye.
The editor of the New England Journal once complained that it was troubling how papers that had only tentative results, more suggestions for further research than conclusions, would get blown out of proportion in the mainstream news media.
Some of the burden is on the journalists, not the researchers.
And of course the journals could make the scientists reframe their papers so they're not catnip for journos.
How do they do that? Start suing news outlets?
But I do agree that at least one of the main problems is that academics have the ability to sift through research while others don't. So better self policing and an easier way for the public to digest the information is probably what's needed here. I think the problem here is that the public don't trust the scientific community to self police.
>Further, the criticism of academia as being full of egg-headed elites who are completely disconnected from the public need has been around for decades - far longer than the current systemic funding and tenure problems.
I think the internet and social media just really took the mask off for a lot of people. The tribalism probably kicked into overdrive when they can just look researchers up and actually confirm that the scientists are part of their outgroup.
I'm not sure that better self policing is a good idea. I think we want academics to be exposed to a sea of research, much of which is half baked or has big flaws. Preventing the "probably wrong, but maybe something is here" papers from being discussed limits the ability to actually make big things happen. There is simply an education problem where laypeople (and media) have decided that peer review is something that it has never been and a huge amount of misunderstanding (deliberate or accidental) of the scientific community derives from this.
> I think the internet and social media just really took the mask off for a lot of people. The tribalism probably kicked into overdrive when they can just look researchers up and actually confirm that the scientists are part of their outgroup.
I think this is definitely true. When TPUSA can basically publish an "enemies list" of academics they don't like the end result is a stream of harassment.