Quality Uncertainty Erodes Trust in Science
By Simine Vazire. 2017
95 citations recorded by the source corpus.
When consumers of science (readers and reviewers) lack relevant details about the study design, data, and analyses, they cannot adequately evaluate the strength of a scientific study. Lack of transparency is common in science, and is encouraged by journals that place more emphasis on the aesthetic appeal of a manuscript than the robustness of its scientific claims. In doing this, journals are implicitly encouraging authors to do whatever it takes to obtain eye-catching results. To achieve this, researchers can use common research practices that beautify results at the expense of the robustness of those results (e.g., p-hacking). The problem is not engaging in these practices, but failing to disclose them. A car whose carburetor is duct-taped to the rest of the car might work perfectly fine, but the buyer has a right to know about the duct-taping. Without high levels of transparency in scientific publications, consumers of scientific manuscripts are in a similar position as buyers of used cars – they cannot reliably tell the difference between lemons and high quality findings. This phenomenon – quality uncertainty – has been shown to erode trust in economic markets, such as the used car market. The same problem threatens to erode trust in science. The solution is to increase transparency and give consumers of scientific research the information they need to accurately evaluate research. Transparency would also encourage researchers to be more careful in how they conduct their studies and write up their results. To make this happen, we must tie journals’ reputations to their practices regarding transparency. Reviewers hold a great deal of power to make this happen, by demanding the transparency needed to rigorously evaluate scientific manuscripts. The public expects transparency from science, and appropriately so – we should be held to a higher standard than used car salespeople.
Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac4cf0e0e199dad4b58798f98dc1d9ce77eb94d6
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Information Systems and Management
In Statistics and Probability
- Farid Anvari
- Steven J. Heine
- Robbie M. Sutton
- Daniël Lakens
- C. Brydges
- Christiany Suwartono
- Casper J. Albers
- A. V. Veer
Citations in the corpus
- Attitudes Towards Science (2018, background): “Some researchers have argued that the lack of public trust in science and scientists stems, at least in part, from legitimate concerns about the openness and quality of scientific research (Edwards & Roy, 2017; Vazire, 2017).”
- The Replicability Crisis and Public Trust in Psychological Science (2018, background): “Vazire (2017) posits that transparency increases the accountability of researchers, incentivising more reliable scientific practices that produce better quality works, and thus reducing public uncertainty about the quality of research findings which, in turn, increases trust in science.”