Yep....turns out that if you incentivize publish or perish you get shitty work. And that's before you start looking at the huge amount of money a single study could generate even if later...
Yep....turns out that if you incentivize publish or perish you get shitty work. And that's before you start looking at the huge amount of money a single study could generate even if later retracted. Until we give a major disincentive for terrible work and have more resources dedicated to replication and catching this fraud in the first place we're going to have more and more problems.
The truth, however, is that the number of retractions in 2022 – 5,500 – is almost definitely a vast undercount of how much misconduct and fraud exists. We estimate that at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year; some scientists and science journalists think the number should be even higher. (To be sure, not every retraction is the result of misconduct; about one in five involve cases of honest error.)
Yep....turns out that if you incentivize publish or perish you get shitty work. And that's before you start looking at the huge amount of money a single study could generate even if later retracted. Until we give a major disincentive for terrible work and have more resources dedicated to replication and catching this fraud in the first place we're going to have more and more problems.