Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability

TL;DR

This paper discusses how current academic incentives prioritize publishability over truth, leading to false results, and proposes strategies to realign incentives to promote more accurate scientific knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces new strategies to restructure incentives and practices, making the pursuit of truth more competitive with publication goals in science.

Findings

Current incentives inflate false effects in published science.

Strategies can realign motivations to prioritize accuracy over publishability.

Proposed approaches account for human biases and motivations.

Abstract

An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and ignore negative results. Prior reports demonstrate how these incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation. Previous suggestions to address this problem are unlikely to be effective. For example, a journal of negative results publishes otherwise unpublishable reports. This enshrines the low status of the journal and its content. The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive - getting it right - competitive with the more tangible and concrete incentive - getting it published. We develop strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and self-serving biases.