I agree in principle but oftentimes the research done by grad-students is part of a project that is spearheaded by a career researcher. I question the notion t

I agree in principle but oftentimes the research done by grad-students is part of a project that is spearheaded by a career researcher. I question the notion that MS and PhD work is filling journals with crap. Instead, I think there are three problems: 1. The inherent problem of inference. When you set p < .05, then 5% of studies will yield false positives. This can be mitigated by a variety of statistical approaches, but it's an irreducible problem on a fundamental level. 2. Certain (sub)disciplines of science aren't very scientific. In particular, they suffer from a high incidence of unfalsifiable claims and hand-wavy definitions. A good example, I think, is the shame vs guilt literature. 3. Certain (sub)disciplines of science are highly politicized. I point my finger at anything involving "identity" (in the sense of "identity politics"), "diversity" (sex, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc) or "bias". Regarding point 3, take a look at the faculty and students of any university you'd like and take stock of how many Black people are working on racism, women on sexism, LGBT on sexual orientation, etc. As a cognitive neuroscientist, I don't want to claim that people can't study themselves, but in light of the serious reproducibility issues that social psychology is facing, I think this correlation is anything but trivial. I strongly suspect that the "hard psych vs social psych" dichotomy can be further broken down, and that the sub-disciplines listed in point 3 account for a disproportionate quantity of false-positive results, on accounts of flawed methodology. I suspect that much of this research is actually an attempt to validate political opinion. I may be wrong about all of this, but at least the core claim testable with a handful of linear regressions.