Abstract
There is an increasing pressure on scholars to publish to further or sustain a career in academia. Governments and funding agencies are greedy of indicators based on scientific production to measure science output. But what exactly do we know about the relation between publication levels and advances in science? How do social dynamics and norms interfere with the quality of the scientific production? Are there different regimes of scientific dynamics? The present study proposes some concepts to think about scientific dynamics, through the modeling of the relation between science policies and scholars’ exploration–exploitation dilemmas. Passing, we analyze in detail the effects of the “publish or perish” policy, that turns out to have no significant effects in the developments of emerging scientific fields, while having detrimental impacts on the quality of the production of mature fields.
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Notes
In particular because the researchers didn’t understand that they were overfitting the data reported.
The original idea underlying this modeling framework was proposed by David Chavalarias (1998) in an unpublished study La thèse de Popper est-elle réfutable?
See for exemple Nature’s Special on Reproducibility: http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-1.17552
Sentence reported from the July 10 2015 CNRS national press release.
See also the online experiment: http://nobelgame.org
We will consider only rewards and losses associated with the fact of being published or falsified. We won’t consider other feature like citations, although they also play an important role in the dynamics of science.
This is only for illustration purposes, the model itself is not limited to this particular case of empirical science.
An alternative approach could be to consider predictions in probability rather than deterministic predictions.
Note that if the first two assumptions were true in real life, there would be no point evaluating scholars; the last assumption is definitely false.
Note that this is a double short-cut since, even if publication incentives were to be reduced to theses rewards, which there are not in the real world, P, R, L will have to include both endogenous rewards (reputation, recognition of peers, etc.) and exogenous reward from the academic establishment (the science policy).
These simulation have been implemented with MatLab. Pseudo code for the algorithm is given in appendixes.
Edmonds (2008), p66.
cf. S8 and supplementary references for the analysis of these ambulance chasing event
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the Complex Systems Institute of Paris le-de-France (ISC-PIF) and the Science en poche project funded by the city of Paris Emergence(s) funding scheme. The author is very grateful to Mihailo Backović for sharing his data about ambulance chasing cases.
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Chavalarias, D. What’s wrong with Science?. Scientometrics 110, 481–503 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2109-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2109-9
Keywords
- Collective discovery
- Distributed knowledge
- Social dynamics
- Science dynamics
- Publish or perish
- Reproducibility
- Science policy