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. This article develops strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and biases.
Abstract Background To evaluate binary classifications and their confusion matrices, scientific researchers can employ several statistical rates, accordingly to the goal of the ...
Conventional observational epidemiology has an unenviable reputation for generating false-positive findings,1,2 or "scares," as others call them.3 In 1993, for example, the New ...
Peer review lies at the core of science and academic life. In one of its most pervasive forms, peer review for the scientific literature is the main mechanism that research jour...
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