https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5
QUOTE:
The number of science and technology research papers published has
skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of
those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically
papers depart from the previous literature1.
END QUOTE:
Like they claim in the article there are a lot more scientists
publishing a lot more papers, but my guess is that a lot of the papers
never needed to be published. Publish or perish seems to be a game of publication counts. I just reviewed a paper where they were trying to
publish a study that they did using the same genotyped populations
published 3 other times before, they just analyze the genotypes using
another method. My take is that incremental improvements is all that
you can expect with that type of publication.
Retraction watch is something that should be taken seriously. These
guys are uncovering paper mill journals, and cabals of "researchers"
that take turns reviewing each other's manuscripts. These types aren't scientists, they are obviously not interested in doing any viable
science or they wouldn't need help getting their junk published.
https://www.science.org/content/article/what-massive-database-retracted-papers-reveals-about-science-publishing-s-death-penalty
One science news article that I recall seeing this year included one
graduate student that had over 100 publications and he was still working
on his PhD. Apparently he had been making up the data and research
using whatever he could get hold of, and getting published. That type
has to be insane, how can you hide something like that when you look for
a job? The current system allowed him to do that. When I was a
graduate student there was researcher at the Univeristy medical center
who had gotten millions of dollars in NIH grants. He published a lot,
but when they checked his equipment use he hadn't used the necessary
equipment enough to have done all his experiments that he had published.
He was just making up experimental results that were consistent with experiments he had actually done years before.
A lot of the insignificant science isn't fraud, but just insignificant.
The statistic that they should use is not quality of papers, but the
actual number of disruptive science papers that get published every
year. That number has likely continued to increase, but likely less,
and less of an increase over time because the closer you get to solving
the mysteries the fewer mysteries there are to solve, and we rely on technological improvements that allow us to do things that we never
could before. Really, something has to feed the paper mill types.
Anything new gets jumped on and possibly over used resulting in a lot of research that probably shouldn't have been published. Look at CRISPR
gene editing. The vast majority of papers are just "we can do it too"
papers, but it spawned an amazing amount of research on modifications of
the system, and getting it to do new things, so there is a lot of "so
what?" but there has also been more than enough research to do something different with it or make it more efficient. You just have to have hip
waders to navigate through what gets published.
Ron Okimoto
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