Related papers: Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring incentives an…
Scientists in some fields are concerned that many, or even most, published results are false. A high rate of false positives might arise accidentally, from shoddy research practices. Or it might be the inevitable result of institutional…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…
The publication process both determines which research receives the most attention, and influences the supply of research through its impact on researchers' private incentives. We introduce a framework to study optimal publication decisions…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor is hindered by monetary restrictions for publishing one's findings and accessing other scientists' reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large…
Reproducibility is an important feature of science; experiments are retested, and analyses are repeated. Trust in the findings increases when consistent results are achieved. Despite the importance of reproducibility, significant work is…
Existing norms for scientific communication are rooted in anachronistic practices of bygone eras, making them needlessly inefficient. We outline a path that moves away from the existing model of scientific communication to improve the…
Several systematic studies have suggested that a large fraction of published research is not reproducible. One probable reason for low reproducibility is insufficient sample size, resulting in low power and low positive predictive value. It…
Recent research in the field of reflexive metrics have studied the emergence and consequences of evaluation gaps in science. The concept of evaluation gaps captures potential discrepancies between what researchers value about their…
The scientific community discourages authors of research papers from citing papers that did not influence them. Such "rhetorical" citations are assumed to degrade the literature and incentives for good work. While a world where authors cite…
New scientific ideas drive progress, yet measuring scientific novelty remains challenging. We use natural language processing to detect the origin and impact of new ideas in scientific publications. To validate our methods, we analyze Nobel…
Recent research\cite{fort} has shown that in the 20th century there is an exponential growth of the number of published scientific papers, but new ideas has only a linear growth with time. The 19th and the first half of the 20th century saw…
Scientific publications enable results and ideas to be transmitted throughout the scientific community. The number and type of journal publications also have become the primary criteria used in evaluating career advancement. Our analysis…
Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Such selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. This paper proposes two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication…
First, for decades the use of anonymity in reviews for science funding proposals and for evaluating manuscripts for publication has been gradually corrupting American science, encouraging and rewarding the dark elements of human nature.…
Scientific publishing is in a transition between the old paper-bound, static forms and the new electronic media with its interactive, dynamic possibilities. This takes place in the context of imploding library budgets and exploding magazine…
In the process of scientific inquiry, certain claims accumulate enough support to be established as facts. Unfortunately, not every claim accorded the status of fact turns out to be true. In this paper, we model the dynamic process by which…