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."

Comments

Will this affect perception of research?

[Transist]

I think a concerning matter is that journalists (not science journals necessarily) also destroy the credibility of science by taking these observations ("according to a recent study...") and running with the "results" as news. A recent one that comes to mind is that researchers noticed that the diabetes medication Metformin seemed to have effects on life expectancy. Of course news outlets are currently running with the story that we might have found the miracle anti-aging pill. You can turn up a bunch of articles by googling the drug. It's usually later found that the claims are hugely inflated by the media and further research really goes nowhere. I suspect that the fatigue of constantly hearing these kind of false-hope and misleading reporting articles might hurt the image of legitimate scientific research. I wonder if this will have an effect on this issue. I suspect researchers may be complicit in providing journalists with these stories that they love to run with. Keeping that kind of speculation to a minimum might help.

honesty...

[l3v1]

"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).

And what's the impact factor?

[TheRaven64]

(Speaking from the perspective of a UK academic, may vary between countries) There is no pressure to publish, as an abstraction. There is pressure to demonstrate impact. The easiest way to demonstrate impact is to publish in top-tier publications. Publishing in a new journal or conference is always a big gamble - if the journal does well later then you may retroactively benefit from a later assessment of its impact, but typically it's in the noise of all of the spammy journals.

Re:And what's the impact factor?

[chihowa]

Impact factor is determined from the number of citations to a journal's articles, so a journal that hasn't published anything has no definable impact factor. It's not zero or low, it's undefined and referencing it is meaningless.

I would expect that a journal that let people publish observations without requiring an accompanying narrative could acquire a decent number of citations, even if the overall impact factor is low. Demonstrating impact through the proxy of a journal's impact factor is just lazy accounting by management types. It's easy enough to count actual citations to a publication to determine an author's impact (even if it can be gamed). Most of the papers that I actually read and cite are not in the ultra-high-impact journals. Most of a fantastically high impact researcher's publications are going to be in a field's bread and butter journal.

The problem starts in school

[Midnight Thunder]

IMHO, the problem starts in school. As an example: you do a chemistry experiment, get some weird results, which aren't the ones you should have been getting, now you have two options, which are either to write up and conclude what you observed or bullshit and write up what was expected, as if it had worked. The first risks getting you low marks, while the second top marks. What do you think most people under pressure to perform would do?

The way I would like to see things done: you write things up as you observed, but add an in the conclusion an analysis of why you think your results varied from expected results. For example, did you put in too much of substance A or substance B, and why would that impacted things. It may put extra work on the teachers, but if we want students who can think and not cover up their tracks, then this may be worth it. A healthy workplace depends on this.

Re:The problem starts in school

[Spinalcold]

Canadian here, I thought that's how it's always done, at least that my experience in Physics. Absolutely NO emphasis was getting the right answer (except for your calculations, even wrong data can be calculated to arrive at some outrageous number), instead marks are on proper note keeping, data COLLECTION and calculation, and of course the conclusion and what-not. That's where you talk about what may have gone wrong and you do not even talk about human error, that can always happen (and the experiment started from scratch to try and fix the human error) and we all SHOULD know that doing an experiment just once is not enough to draw any proper conclusion

There is no "view from nowhere"

[AlejoHausner]

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.