Related papers: The Natural Selection of Bad Science

Popularity bias is a long-standing challenge in recommender systems. Such a bias exerts detrimental impact on both users and item providers, and many efforts have been dedicated to studying and solving such a bias. However, most existing…

For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not…

A leading explanation for widespread replication failures is publication bias. I show in a simple model of selective publication that, contrary to common perceptions, the replication rate is unaffected by the suppression of insignificant…

Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…

Data can be collected in scientific studies via a controlled experiment or passive observation. Big data is often collected in a passive way, e.g. from social media. In studies of causation great efforts are made to guard against bias and…

There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…

Despite persistent efforts to understand the dynamics of creativity of scientists over careers in terms of productivity, impact, and prize, little is known about the dynamics of scientists' disruptive efforts that affect individual academic…

Science can be seen as a sequential process where each new study augments evidence to the existing knowledge. To have the best prospects to make an impact in this process, a new study should be designed optimally taking into account the…

We are witnessing a rapid trend towards the adoption of exercises for evaluation of national research systems, generally based on the peer review approach. They respond to two main needs: stimulating higher efficiency in research activities…

For obtaining causal inferences that are objective, and therefore have the best chance of revealing scientific truths, carefully designed and executed randomized experiments are generally considered to be the gold standard. Observational…

This position paper argues that decisions on processes, tools, techniques and software artifacts (such as user manuals, unit tests, design documents and code) for scientific software development should be driven by science, not by personal…

The last decades saw dramatic progress in brain research. These advances were often buttressed by probing single variables to make circumscribed discoveries, typically through null hypothesis significance testing. New ways for generating…

Machine learning has the potential to fuel further advances in data science, but it is greatly hindered by an ad hoc design process, poor data hygiene, and a lack of statistical rigor in model evaluation. Recently, these issues have begun…

Publications proposing novel machine learning methods are often primarily rated by exhibited predictive performance on selected problems. In this position paper we argue that predictive performance alone is not a good indicator for the…

How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…

It is important to explore how scientists decide their research agenda and the corresponding consequences, as their decisions collectively shape contemporary science. There are studies focusing on the overall performance of individuals with…

The history of science reveals that major discoveries are not predictable. Naively, one might conclude therefore that it is not possible to artificially cultivate an environment that promotes discoveries. I suggest instead that open…

The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…

Measurement is a complicated but very necessary task. Many indices have been created in an effort to define the quality of knowledge produced but they have attracted strong criticism, having become synonymous with individualism, competition…

Societal accumulation of knowledge is a complex process. The correctness of new units of knowledge depends not only on the correctness of new reasoning, but also on the correctness of old units that the new one builds on. The errors in such…