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It’s also important I feel to stress that this behaviour exists at multiple levels of magnitude. A professor may not be bending journals and whole fields to the
by maegul 4y ago
It’s also important I feel to stress that this behaviour exists at multiple levels of magnitude. A professor may not be bending journals and whole fields to their will, but can expect and pressure consistently positive results from their lab, to the point of being actively reckless with the truth and blind to the flaws in their theories.
Just getting caught up in the practice of self-promotion and the trumpeting of one’s “novel and impactful” ideas while managing a lab from the top without having done actual frontline research work in some time can take you pretty far from scientific integrity IMO.
With no culture of being proud of reporting negative or contradictory results, I’d say “excessive scientific zeal” is an easy and common trap. Even a slightly forceful lab-leader or PI can end up swaying a group of people into some grey dishonest zone of scientific practice.
- klipt 4y agoThis is why science needs to formally pre register hypotheses. "People tested this ten times and it worked once" is infinitely more useful info than "someone published a paper because this works! But we have no idea how many people tried exactly the same thing and got a negative result".