Do pressures to publish increase scientists' bias? An empirical support from US States Data.
Do pressures to publish increase scientists' bias? An empirical support from US States Data.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0010271
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发表时间：
2010-04-21
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Fanelli D
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fanelli D
学术界日益激烈的竞争和“发表或灭亡”的文化可能与研究的客观性和完整性发生冲突，因为它迫使科学家不惜一切代价产生“可发表”的结果。如果论文报告“负面”结果（无法支持测试假设的结果），那么论文发表和被引用的可能性就会降低。因此，如果出版压力增加了科学偏见，那么在竞争更激烈和“富有成效”的学术环境中，文献中“积极”结果的频率应该更高。这项研究通过测量美国通讯作者的大量随机论文样本中阳性结果的频率，验证了这一假设。根据国家科学基金会的数据，在所有学科中，如果论文的通讯作者所在的州人均发表学术论文较多，那么论文更有可能支持经过检验的假设。当控制国家人均研发支出和先前研究显示与积极结果频率相关的研究特征（包括学科和方法）时，这种效应的大小会增加。尽管不能排除机构声望的混杂效应（生产力较高的大学中的研究人员可能是实验中最聪明、最成功的），但这些结果支持了这样的假设：竞争性学术环境不仅提高了科学家的生产力，还提高了他们的偏见。在学术竞争和出版压力很大的其他国家也可能会出现同样的现象。
The growing competition and “publish or perish” culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce “publishable” results at all costs. Papers are less likely to be published and to be cited if they report “negative” results (results that fail to support the tested hypothesis). Therefore, if publication pressures increase scientific bias, the frequency of “positive” results in the literature should be higher in the more competitive and “productive” academic environments. This study verified this hypothesis by measuring the frequency of positive results in a large random sample of papers with a corresponding author based in the US. Across all disciplines, papers were more likely to support a tested hypothesis if their corresponding authors were working in states that, according to NSF data, produced more academic papers per capita. The size of this effect increased when controlling for state's per capita R&D expenditure and for study characteristics that previous research showed to correlate with the frequency of positive results, including discipline and methodology. Although the confounding effect of institutions' prestige could not be excluded (researchers in the more productive universities could be the most clever and successful in their experiments), these results support the hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists' productivity but also their bias. The same phenomenon might be observed in other countries where academic competition and pressures to publish are high.
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