Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists' Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data

By Daniele Fanelli. PLoS ONE, 2010

680 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The growing competition and “publish or perish” culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce “publishable” results at all costs. Papers are less likely to be published and to be cited if they report “negative” results (results that fail to support the tested hypothesis). Therefore, if publication pressures increase scientific bias, the frequency of “positive” results in the literature should be higher in the more competitive and “productive” academic environments. This study verified this hypothesis by measuring the frequency of positive results in a large random sample of papers with a corresponding author based in the US. Across all disciplines, papers were more likely to support a tested hypothesis if their corresponding authors were working in states that, according to NSF data, produced more academic papers per capita. The size of this effect increased when controlling for state's per capita R&D expenditure and for study characteristics that previous research showed to correlate with the frequency of positive results, including discipline and methodology. Although the confounding effect of institutions' prestige could not be excluded (researchers in the more productive universities could be the most clever and successful in their experiments), these results support the hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists' productivity but also their bias. The same phenomenon might be observed in other countries where academic competition and pressures to publish are high.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Pharmacology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/190d80556b1a80528abc0dff6661e86036f3f33c

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Citations in the corpus

Publishing not perishing: how research students transition from novice to knowledgeable using systematic quantitative literature reviews (2015, neutral): “Various measures of performance and impact now allow the ranking of intellectual capital, and of individuals competing for limited fun ding and employment (Fanelli 2010; Nicolini and Nozz, 2008; Young et al. 2008).”
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology (2012, background): “The study of Fanelli (2010) finds that ‘ythese results support the hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists’ productivity but also their bias.’”
Bias in peer review (2013, neutral): “Fanelli, D. (2010). Do pressures to publish increase scientists’ bias? An”
What is open peer review? A systematic review (2017, background): “, 2017) mean that editors and reviewers seem primed to prefer positive results over negative or neutral ones (Bardy, 1998; Dickersin et al., 1992; Fanelli, 2010; Ioannidis, 1998), and to disfavour replication studies (Campanario, 1998; Kerr et al.”
Reducing Implicit Prejudice (2013, background): “Achieving a positive result – i.e., demonstrating that a manipulation changes implicit evaluation – is a de facto requirement for publication (Fanelli, 2010, 2012; Greenwald, 1975; Meehl, 1978; Nosek, Spies, & Motyl, 2012; Sterling, Rosenbaum, & Weinkam, 1995).”
Local-Group tests of dark-matter concordance cosmology - Towards a new paradigm for structure formation (2010, background): “The five problems thus appear to rather strongly challenge the notion that the CCM successfully accounts for galactic structure in conflict with a vast volume of reported research (compare with Fanelli 2010).”
When Does HARKing Hurt? Identifying When Different Types of Undisclosed Post Hoc Hypothesizing Harm Scientific Progress (2017, background): “…& Heene, 2012), and that researchers often experience implicit pressures to select hypotheses that are confirmed by their results in order to increase their chances of publishing their work (e.g., Fanelli, 2010; Mazzola & Deuling, 2013; Motyl et al., 2017; Nosek et al., 2017; O’Boyle et al., 2017).”
Intended and unintended consequences of a publish-or-perish culture: A worldwide survey (2012, background): “This bias has always been an issue in science, but the pressure to publish in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because — as Fanelli (2010) makes clear — “it forces scientists to produce ‘publishable’ results at all costs.””
Is Peer Review a Good Idea? (2020, background): “For instance, social epistemologists have studied both the incentive to collaborate, and various iniquities that can arise when scientists do not start with equal power when deciding who shall do what work and how they shall be credited (Harding [1995]; Boyer-Kassem and Imbert [2015]; Bruner and O’C”
The flipped classroom in second language learning: A meta-analysis (2020, background): “Similarly, it has been argued that reports published in journals have a higher likelihood of publication bias as significant results with noteworthy effects tend to be favored (Fanelli, 2010).”
Rising complexity and falling explanatory power in ecology (2014, background): “2007), and the consequences of selective publication processes (Fanelli 2010; Calcagno et al. 2012).”
Engagement in language learning: A systematic review of 20 years of research methods and definitions (2021, background): “Such comprehensiveness is in line with Norris and Ortega (2000), and the rationale for such comprehensiveness includes the mitigation of selection and publication biases where large and significant effects are favored to be published (Fanelli, 2010).”