Incentives in Academic Research
msoos.org
msoos.org
In my first faculty position about 20 years ago, I followed a line of research that a senior (MacArthur Fellowship-winning) colleague had pioneered. After three years and a few negative results, I came to suspect that several high-profile publications were p-hacked and likely false positives.
It was extremely demotivating, to say the least. I switched to a different field and fairly soon afterward left academia altogether.
A very senior scientist later confirmed my suspicions about their disregard for professional ethics.
I still don’t think I was a great bench chemist but I think about this a lot - especially because at the time many folks in my chemistry building dismissed failed reactions published in journals. They just shrugged them off and tried something else instead of reaching out and asking the publisher - “hey, I can’t get this to work, what am i doing wrong?”
I regret not questioning more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
My take is that the main cause is poor methodology rather than outright falsification, but the outcome is the same: you can't trust a result until it has been confirmed in an independent study.
My brother in law only got one publication out of his PhD because his results were all negative, despite following a promising line of research. I'm glad to say that it wasn't a permanent setback -- he is now a full professor and edits a journal -- but it is a real testament to his ability and hard work that he could overcome that and succeed in a profession that is so demanding and competitive.
"I followed a line of research that a senior (MacArthur Fellowship-winning) colleague had pioneered... After three years and a few negative results, I came to suspect that several high-profile publications were p-hacked and likely false positives... A very senior scientist later confirmed my suspicions about their disregard for professional ethics."
These issues should be discussed openly. This also means that the consequences should be appropriate. In many domains -- anything dealing with sex / gender in almost any culture is a good example to look at -- the consequences are draconian, be that stoning or cancel culture or ... which prevents open conversations.
These are all spectra.
a) analysis of current incentives; and
b) proposal to change those for a better outcome;
The chief issue with external incentives like "fame" or "money" is that they will attract a lot of people who care about the reward, but not the work. If they can find a way to cut corners, they will. So it works fine if you have a very tight, objective and reproducible evaluation criterion such that you can't get rewarded for poor or sloppy work, but even in science this is difficult to establish, especially in a crowded field where most advancements will be small and incremental. Science works a lot on trust, if only trust that the described experiments were indeed made and the results were indeed as reported.
That's why I feel we get the best science when it's driven by people who just intrinsically want the best science, because getting it right is a reward in and of itself. It'd be neat if it was possible to identify them and just let them cook, regardless of whether results are produced or not. Paradoxically, I think this may be easiest in a setting where academia is undervalued -- the knowledge-seekers will always self-select into research (provided the conditions are good enough and they are not too undervalued), but the fame-chasers will have to find their validation elsewhere.
Referees/Publishers are set against Researchers, in, I dunno here, that their incentive is to make sure the researchers are wrong in some little way.
Researchers are set against the Grant Funders. Like, maybe you have to elect them somehow?
Grant Funders are set against the Publishers in that they select journals for funding. Look, it's Monday morning, I'm grasping at straws here, alright?
Anyways, take whatever many groups you have, at least 3 for proper roshambo mechanics, and set their incentives against each other, round and round, and such that at the end, you have 'Science' spinning towards greater public service.
I believe publishing papers and citations are those proxy metrics.
[0] https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
This isn't just "misaligned rewards", it's academia pretending to reward one thing when really it does something else entirely.
As the author observes, objective truth is no longer socially rewarded. Pretense is all that matters and accepted as "social truth".
Science, and research in general, should mostly be concerned with effective truth. The best objective-ish explanations so far, but something that can always be challenged with new evidence. The difference to objective/social concepts of truth is that you should always be willing to question the assumptions, beliefs, and reasoning ability you and people who agree with you have. If you discover something that goes against established beliefs, you should always start by assuming that you made a mistake somewhere. And if other people discover something like that, and it looks like they are seriously questioning the discovery, you should also take it seriously.
"Objective" truth is what you can derive from physical reality by logical arguments. The very opposite of "belief".
Social truth is what your social peer group wants you to believe.
"Effective" truth I've never heard about and your explanation merely describes a simplistic popular scientific method concept. Leading ideally to the objective truth I was talking about.
The internet describes "effective truth" (or "effectual truth," from the Italian la verità effetuale) as a philosophical concept introduced by Niccolò Machiavelli in his book "The Prince". It means judging people, leaders, and situations by their actual actions and real-world results rather than by their stated words, ideals, or moral promises.
I think once you come to terms with this, you come out on the other side realizing that this is nothing new. The idealized version never existed. What's new is the scale and all the quantitative metrics regarding publication.
> Academic research was meant to be about breaking new ground, keeping to honesty and good scientific conduct, being clear and upfront about uncertainties, errors, and mistakes, and improving our common understanding of science, all the while training the new generation to follow these goals and principles.
This is a naive idealism. Research takes effort and someone has to pay. Sometimes this someone's may profess beliefs that they only want to sponsor unrestricted objective inquiry, but everyone has biases and in an iterated game, soft preferences will be gamed too. In other words, there's is always an effect of "the one who pays orders the song".
The one who pays wants results. He wants prestige through the sponsored project. He doesn't want the researcher to just sit in a room and fail to generate results for years. He wants the researcher to have groundbreaking results. What they are matters less than that they be impressive and improve prestige of the funding source, among peers (in case of nobility funding it), or among the political classes (when government funds it), or to improve the PR and make the sponsor look good and charitable (if a company funds it as a sort of donation to academia).
Much of this "reward" that accrues to the funder does not really depend on the technical content of the work, only inasmuch as such quality was necessary to convince the research community to designate the work as impressive. However if this designation can be helped along via other paths, ie the quid pro quo and backscratching networks, that can be just as good for the funder as long as it doesn't rise to the level of fraud or something that may really damage the reputation.
Always,always follow the money and follow the chain of decisions.
Who will feel good at a cocktail party among their social peers when some impressive research result happens? Who can puff up their chest and say "We paid for that! Look how awesome we are!" and when they summarize the result in a soundbite will it impress their social peers?
This is not only applicable to the actual funding provider but also other orgs in the chain like university administration who provide facilities to the lab etc.
My experience and disillusionment is different from yours. I was inspired to do research from nerdy blog posts from researchers in my field. And my experience has mostly been that people in my field are honest, hard working, genuinely interested in doing their research as well as possible – mostly to satisfy their curiosity and sharing their findings with others. Any disillusion I have experienced has been about the fact that doing research is more or less something they squeeze in between teaching, applying for money and administrative tasks.
I feel completely disillusioned with academia, this is apparently the "reward" that the funder wants. In the end I have time to do whatever I want because this business it running itself.
Most reviewers hate reviewing, don't get rewarded for it, the papers they reward are usually bad (as acceptance rate is around 20-25%), so they are forced to do it via reciprocal reviewing rules where submitter must also review, but they review with AI, the area chairs write their meta review with AI, they (area chairs) can arbitrarily reject a paper even with "accept" reviews, delaying people's graduation by half a year or more. Also, meanwhile much of the research in eg AI ML application areas where you tweak the architecture and beat a benchmark (vast majority of the tens of thousands of submissions) can now be done better with AI.
Yes there are elite academics who do deep foundational thoughtful stuff but the system is totally subverted because most participants don't give a shit and don't feel any long term allegiance to the "research community". They take what they can, and are out very soon. Of course this means the signal and prestige of papers on your CV will tank. And having too many may have the opposite effect l already today.
This is an underappreciated point. I was telling someone in the lab the other day after we saw our ICLR submission ID... that it more so revealed how much existing AI/ML research was very nearly slop.
Same way, most published papers are much more about a junior researcher gaining experience, learning how to speak clearly in a talk, how to summarize work in poster format, how to write, how to make figures, etc. etc. even if the final result is meh, they kind of got initiated into all this song and dance and that's what the academics really want to do, to pass on their culture basically. When this experience actually gets "truly" deployed is a good question though, because once you reach that level, you basically become a manager and all your later papers will be again written by the juniors honing their skills that you hired, because you no longer have time to do hands-on research once you were actually starting to become good at it, because now you just have meetings, write grant applications, sit on committees, teach courses, go to faculty meetings, help co-organize conferences etc. etc.
Anyways the point is that, students working in that long term goal oriented project oriented setting is in many ways nicee than the typical "paper mill" approach. They still do get all the skills you mentioned since publishing something by yourself is mandatory still, but they spend a lot of time on practical problems.
I think AI can be very effective in research but spending more effort on making one or two really great papers per year gets you better career results than 10 mediocre ones per month.
> The quote says "it should be like this"
It should also be that I don't need to lock my car door, but (in most places in the world) I do. If I were to write an article voicing this "it should not be like this" statement, would I seem to you like a brave defender of cultural standards, or just a bit naive?
That's not to say that the culture of academia, with its norms of honesty and integrity, has zero effect. I still think it has a large positive effect and is worth preserving, and it's valuable to talk about it (as TFA does) when it seems to be slipping. But overall, I'm not surprised that this is how things are in academia.
At the end of the day, the grant committees, even if they are composed of peer academics, know very well what results are needed so that funding will be sustained also in the future. It's an iterated game.
And to be clear, it's not that I am claiming that there are not bad incentive structures in science-- there are; I'm saying that peer reviewer's on grant committees/study sections are not the root of those problems...not propagating those problems with their decision making on individual level grants...it's way too cynical of a suggestion. Instead, blame the laws that govern grant funding mechanisms (we spend way too much time begging for funding instead of doing science), blame Universities for using impact factors and publication counts as proxy metric for researcher quality, etc. But peer review itself? Only if you blame scientists for eating the only food that is given to them by the system-level structures involved. So, yes, obtuse.
Most useful research is exactly like this, but where the donor comes to you expecting a problem to be solved and it turns out that we are on the cusp of that. That is the case where this model really works optimally. Otherwise its suboptimal, but it is also the best that we have.
Can't game away human at-scale nature at the end of the day.
Publish a PR that has the word "fix" in the description, get it approved, release it to prod... you are the hero, took action, will get promoted, etc.
When it turns out that the "fix" makes everything worse... well, that's everyone _else's_ problem, like whichever users run into that change blowing up, whoever is on support that day, whoever has to undo it.
The old... "concentrated benefits and diffuse costs" problem.
Also anecdotal, as a peer reviewer, I too often encounter shoddy, careless, or even probably fraudulent conduct papers, and it frustrates me because peer review is not cost free: Authors are asking scientists to spend their precious time to understand the author's work, and that only works under a social contract....that authors only send out manuscripts for peer review after they have tried their best to do their best science.
I hate to say it, because I know that China has great scientists, but most of the manuscripts I receive and reject due to sloppy work, or purposeful negligence in citing most directly relevant to their manuscript (often because that literature did exactly what they are trying to pass if as new), or out-right making shit up, have been manuscripts from Chinese Universities. Yes it happens from western authors as well, but what I am naming is real, and is increasingly a major burden on peer-review as a scientific institution. So much so that many have confided to me that they will refuse to serve as a reviewer of a manuscript out of China unless it is from a known lab of some standing. In science, there must be a culture motivated not by number of papers published or grants funded, but by its rigor and integrity, and like the finest craftsman who cares most cares about doing the finest of work. That matters, and that culture of integrity and personal pride, does need to be encouraged and rewarded, no matter where the lab is located.
This is all to say that I agree with the author, despite their lack of empirical evidence, that these values are under threat.
Its fucked up, but I am getting a lot of praise from the department/supervisor, I got an very good internship lined up next summer, and I have plenty of time to study whatever I find meaningful because the slop generates itself. I think that this ship will sink if enough people do this, so I set up similar systems for some of my colleagues as well. The only way to break the system is to overload it until it doesn't work, so I can only hope for this.
This is a joke, right?
But people are clearly attempting to do this, and some are going to get successful. Putting your paper into ChatGPT prior to submission to get free feedback is really table stakes these days, and you can be sure reviewers are breaking the rules by using LLMs.
I have in fact set up similar autosubmission systems for my peers who wanted it and they are already finding success with it 2 months later.
Best-case, funding will be given with less strings attached, and academia will be about science and discovery instead of status chasing, hierarchy building and number of papers as an incentive.
Worst-case, everything will be clout/social-based instead. Your papers will only be accepted if your dept/supervisor/company has clout.
Either way, the outcome that things will break is inevitable, and the monkey-patching the conferences are applying currently due to the overload like max submission counts and prompt-injections are temporary measures that will not fix the core of that the incentive of paper count and H-index does not make sense in a world where information can be generated for free.
Recently, I have bumped into multiple cases where I believe the correctness of the results, the honesty of the people writing them, or the lack of curiosity once they are told that their results are wrong, incorrect, faulty, or misleading, has been unsatisfying.
Note "I believe the correctness of the results....has been unsatisfying." Sure it might be unsatisfying for the author but on average the correctness is only increasing because of the increased scrutiny
The prospects for progress rely on the hope that meritorious research (e.g. Mendel) will eventually be recognized by the academic community, even if professional incentives reward other work.
Be brave. Go public. Name names. And don't be a part of the system.
You'll earn more and do more with your life and for society at large by getting to a place in engineering where you can spend an increasing fraction of your time on research.
That is: the problems are in the system.
Better: if not plain fraud, the "faulty" papers should stay where they are, and editors (or conference chairs, etc.) should encourage follow-ups (incl. replications, commentaries, and whatever), which, with "modern" technology, could be linked to the papers.
What people typically do is just to ignore bad research, and withhold praise, and do their own research in a better direction.
A slightly sad side-effect of the follow-up-paper idea, is that it sometimes means that the authors get one more citation, and furthermore, since some of the authors may themselves write part of it, it would mean even more papers by the authors, potentially further cited. So we may be unfortunately incentivizing sloppy research -- the authors can now make two papers: one sloppy, and one fixed. Not sure that's great.
I am not saying what you are proposing is wrong. But it has side-effects that are not great.
It's like as if someone talked about tax fraud or "tax optimization" and you retorted that an upstanding business owner doesn't cheat on their taxes and even donates some extra funding towards public causes and if he makes a mistake in the taxes he quickly publicly admits it and pays the fine. But if honesty bankrupts a business, all businesses that stay alive in such an environment will be ones that do some form of tax fraud. No matter how much someone stands there wagging their finger and declaring from the cathedra what upstanding business owners do, in the abstract.
There are indeed constraints other than one's own personal or professional virtue. The principal one is that if your work does not convince your professional peers, it will not get funded or published.
You can't just invent a bogus research program out of thin air, hold a press conference, and expect to get hailed as the new Einstein.
For example: claims of cold fusion, room temperature superconductors, and similar marvels appear fairly frequently and are quickly knocked down because experts in the field can tell they are false. (NB these are not necessarily frauds, just bad science.)
There are also institutional constraints provided by the universities and professional societies to which academics belong.
Scandals about plagiarism and fraud only hit the news when these institutions take action against senior academics. This typically only happens in the worst cases where there is a clear pattern of behavior and the guardrails have obviously failed.
IMO long running and successful frauds like Cyril Burt tend to already have the benefit of a well-earned professional reputation, but have gone about boosting their credibility in an unethical way.
Small bore fraud is hard to catch. It's like padding your resume. If you say you won the Nobel prize, people will smell a rat. But a lot of it probably gets under the radar.
The problem is that today's peer review, while better than nothing, is far from a perfect judge of research quality. If peer-review was a perfect judge of research quality, there would be no incentive problem. The incentives would be aligned.
I happen to be working on an improvement to peer review. An early prototype can be viewed at https://peeryview.org/about. Holler at me if you're also working on this problem!
We can tweak the process, but for better or worse peer review (in various forms) has been the principle metric of quality since the enlightenment.