Doug Sheridan Reflects
Allysia Finley writes in the WSJ, scientists were aghast last month when Patrick Brown, climate director at the The Breakthrough Institute, acknowledged he’d censored one of his studies to increase his odds of getting published. Credit to him for being honest about something his peers also do but are loath to admit.
Brown said he omitted “key aspects other than climate change” from a paper on California wildfires because such details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.” Editors of scientific journals, he wrote, “have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives.”
Brown’s criticisms aren’t new. In 2005, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis wrote an essay titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” He contended that scientists “may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings.”
“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” Ioannidis argued. “Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.”
Scientists also use the peer-review process to suppress findings that challenge their own beliefs. This perpetuates “false dogma.” As Ioannidis explained, the more scientists in a field, the more competition there is to get published and the more likely they are to produce “impressive ‘positive’ results” and “extreme research claims.”
Journals often don’t compensate peer reviewers, which can result in perfunctory work. Reviewers also often disregard a study’s flaws when its conclusions reinforce their own biases. Thus “a large share of what is published may not be replicable or is obviously false,” Ioannidis notes. “Even outright fraud may be becoming more common.”
Ioannidis notes, “Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society.” Those “stakeholders” include the scientific journals themselves, which he notes have among the highest profit margins of any industry—by some estimates, about 40%.
As scientists struggle to publish against-the-grain research, many are turning to preprint servers—online academic repositories—to debunk studies in mainstream journals. Yet even some of those sites, such as the Social Science Research Network, are blocking studies that don’t fit preapproved narratives.
To Sum It Up: Scientific journals and preprint servers aren’t selective about research quality. They’re selective about conclusions. If experts want to know why the public don’t trust “science,” they have their answer. Too many scientists no longer care about science.