Incentives Vs. Information: Why the Best Science isn’t Always Published
October 22, 2016 SHELBY ROGERS

... the need for popular and cool research has even tampered with defining success in the sciences. Papers and findings get awards which lead to grant money which leads to more papers, and the cycle continues. However, the cycle can quickly spiral out of control, resulting in unintended consequences.

“The problem that we face is that the incentive system is focused almost entirely on getting research published, rather than on getting research right,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in an interview with Science News.

“Real evaluation of scientific quality is as hard as doing the science in the first place,” Nosek says. “So, just like everyone else, scientists use heuristics to evaluate each other’s work when they don’t have time to dig into it for a complete evaluation.”

Paul Smaldino, a cognitive scientist at University California Merced, put that theory to the test to determine if poor science wins out. Smaldino and Richard McElreath at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig created a simulation of a scientific “ecosystem.” Just like natural selection, the simulated labs that best met “success” parameters reproduced. The ones that didn’t simply died out.

Smaldino and McElreath discovered that...