Hmmm...The fields of science affected by patents are worst affected, but all fields of science are today in at least some form of crisis. "Publish or perish", and a bureacratic/accountancy driven push for quantity of publications over quality, has caused an explosion in the number of published articles and an equally dramatic drop in the substance of said articles.
The result is that even in a small sub-field, there are too many publications for an indiviual to keep track of. Actually reading other people's articles takes a lot of time, often only to discover that the reported research is superficial and the time spent understanding the paper was wasted anyway. This results in people not bothering to read the literature, and instead just repeating work some other group has already published. This contributes to the explosion of publications, and thereby keeps the bureacrats happy. But the effect on science is overwhelmingly negative.
An associated effect is that the real interest in the research is often obsfucated in the publication. If it was clear from a cursory reading how superficial the research was, the journal referee's might reject it. And if some other research group can figure out exactly what you did, they might be able to reproduce your work and scoop your future researches.
Fields subject to commercial interests suffer extremely badly from this, to the extent that in drug research, much of the interesting research is never published publically at all.
Friday, January 20
Science Crisis
Interesting article on Slashdot at the moment about a crisis in science. There was a neat theory (Imre Lakatos, I think) about the size of scientific communities based on the ratio of number of papers one scientist publishes in a year vs the number s/he reads in a year. A field was defined as being a bunch of people who agreed on what needed researching (the positive heuristic e.g. we need to predict the paths of those pesky near earth objects) and what could be taken on trust (the negative heauristic, e.g. telescopes make things bigger). Once the number of scientists in this field got bigger than the ratio of papers produced and papers read (about 300), the field split into two.
A thought provoking response to the slashdot article then from a physics postdoc:
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3 comments:
How about having multiple grades of risk assigned to drugs instead of 'safe' and 'non-safe'?
Thus there is the 'we're pretty sure this one is ok, but please read the label' right through to 'we think that some people who took it and died didn't actually die from taking the drug' via 'your guiess is as good as ours'. You could rate things on two scales: confidence of results and risk of death, a bit like the healthy eating stickers in supermarkets.
Just a thought.
I'm waiting for the "Tested on Animals" labels to be made compulsory on all drugs. Make those idiot protestors think twice.
And, indeed, if they actually replaced those boring heathy-eating stickers with a reverse scale risk-of-death stickers it would make eating junk food far more exciting. Perhaps with a philosophy helpline for people stricken with existential dread.
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