Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability

By Brian A. Nosek, Jeffrey R. Spies, Matt Motyl. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012

860 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An academic scientist’s professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and ignore negative results. Prior reports demonstrate how these incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation. Previous suggestions to address this problem are unlikely to be effective. For example, a journal of negative results publishes otherwise unpublishable reports. This enshrines the low status of the journal and its content. The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive—getting it right—competitive with the more tangible and concrete incentive—getting it published. This article develops strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and biases.

Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c349da703be826c587a572dde87f6e4011fdb6b

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Citations in the corpus

Recommendations for Increasing Replicability in Psychology † (2013, background): “We need better ways to connect our findings—not just knowing who has cited whom but what they have cited each other for (Spellman, 2012).”
An Agenda for Purely Confirmatory Research (2012, neutral): “This special issue features several papers that propose remedies to right what is wrong, such as changes in incentive structures (Nosek et al., 2012) and an increased focus on replicability (Bakker et al.”
The consequences of checking for zero‐inflation and overdispersion in the analysis of count data (2019, background): “…a ‘quiet scandal in the statistical community’ (Breiman, 1992) and is now all the more important to understand given recent concerns with research reproducibility and researcher incentives (Campbell & Gustafson, 2019; Fraser et al., 2018; Gelman & Loken, 2013; Kelly, 2019; Nosek et al., 2012).”
Replication Research and Special Education (2016, methodology): “Whereas direct replication is used to investigate the validity of previously reported findings, conceptual replication validates the underlying theory used to explain those findings (Earp & Trafimow, 2015; Nosek et al., 2012).”