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New Scientific Journal To Publish "Discrete Observations Rather Than Complete Stories" (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Is the pressure to publish tempting scientists to improperly tweak their findings in order to create more cohesive stories? If researchers could report just the one finding they felt comfortable with, perhaps there would be no need to be dishonest. That thinking has spurred the creation of a new scientific journal, Matters. The open-access publication aims to boost integrity and speed the communication of science by allowing researchers to publish discrete observations rather than complete stories. "Observations, not stories, are the pillars of good science," the journal's editors write on Matters' website. "Today's journals however, favor story-telling over observations, and congruency over complexity Moreover, incentives associated with publishing in high-impact journals lead to loss of scientifically and ethically sound observations that do not fit the storyline, and in some unfortunate cases also to fraudulence."
"If researchers could report just the one finding they felt comfortable with, perhaps there would be no need to be dishonest."
Scientist speaking here. One finding in no finding. It's luck or mistake. If there's just one "finding" you're "comfortable with", it's not publication you should think about, it's changing what you do and how you do it.
"incentives associated with publishing in high-impact journals lead to loss of scientifically and ethically sound observations"
Bullcrap. And "that's all I have to say about that"
"Today's journals [...] favor [...] congruency over complexity"
Uhmm, sorry, what now? Why would one exclude the other? On the other hand, would they want journals that prefer complexity over congruency? Now, that would be a doozy.
"There are few, if any, places to publish one-off experiments that arenâ(TM)t part of a bigger story but might still be informative. So unless the researcher âoeinvests in a series of additional experiments to package the failed reproduction, that result will languish in laboratory notebooks,â"
Well, I don't think I could be convinced we should value un-reproducible one-off experimental "results". Ever. However, there's nothing stopping you people publish such "results", you know, there's the Internet and whatnot.
"a researcher who is able to show, with proper controls and statistics, that an extract from eucalyptus bark relieves pain under certain conditions. âoeIn todayâ(TM)s world, you canâ(TM)t publish that in a good journal,â Rajendran says. âoeYou would need to know which molecule it is"
Hell, good that it is so. There are still some people out there who actually like to know what the hell it is they put into their bodies and how it works (and that it actually works).
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The most prominent motivation for this proposal lies in prominent failures and retractions in medical and psychological research. As a recent meta-study showed, most psychological studies are not reproducible (probably because their pool of subjects consisted of university students, a very weird bunch of people ;-). Also, many drug studies are influenced by pharmaceutical industry funding.
But the article's proposal won't work. It assumes, at some level, that there are fundamental facts, and that it's possible to discover these facts, without a theory. That's why they are proposing publishing discrete observations, without any "story" that observations fit into. But philosophers have thought about this already. Kant's theory of categories explains that you can't perceive facts "raw", but always see the world through some mental model you carry with you, wether you know it or not. So you always have a model of the world, which colours your perceptions.
I would argue, further, that thinking itself is impossible without a model. You need a structure to hang your ideas onto. You can't stand fully outside your own biases and mental preconceptions, and see things are they "really are". Your model may change over time, or someone else's model may become accepted as better, and observations will then fit into a different "story". That's what a scientific revolution is: a change of model to explain the same phenomena.
Facts need to published within the context of a "story". There's no way around this. At most, we can try to be aware of the story we are caught inside of.