Adonis Diaries

“First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds.

Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results.

For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game.

Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions.

Those who followed the fashion would get grants, and pretty soon many would learn to follow the fashion, too.

The Consolidation-Disruption Index Is Alarming:

Rather than blame individual scientists, the problem is in a system that encourages volume over quality.

There are predatory journals that make researchers pay money to publish their papers there, with only symbolic peer review, and then the journals play games by making the authors cite articles from the same journal

These incentives might create a surplus of papers that just aren’t any good—that is, they exist purely to advance careers, not science.