Collaborative Research: How do publication and funding filters shape the science that we do, and how we learn from it?

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Science provides an extraordinarily powerful tool for investigating nature, and nature supplies anendless abundance of research topics that are ripe for scientists to investigate. Faced with suchabundance, scientists must regularly choose where to place their efforts: which questions to pursue andwhich to leave for another day, which results to prepare for publication and which to set aside, and soon. When making these decisions, researchers face incentives that scientific funders and scientificjournals create through the peer‐review processes that funders and journals use to ensure quality andrigor in the science they support and publish. Yet we understand very little about how the incentivescreated by peer‐review in scientific funding and publication shape the scientific activity of individualinvestigators, and how those decisions scale up to impact the aggregate knowledge that science creates.In this project, we will develop new mathematical theory to understand how incentives created byscientific funders and journals affect individual scientific activity and the subsequent production ofscientific knowledge. This theory will provide a foundation for evaluating proposed refinements offunding or publication practices, and for understanding whether these changes will nudge the scientificenterprise towards a more reliable and expansive understanding of the natural world.We will focus on two questions. First, how do journals' publication decisions shape the ability of theirreadership to learn from the scientific literature? Second, how do the incentives created by funding andpublication structures motivate scientists to work on certain projects and shy away from others? Foreach question, we will ask how peer‐review filters function differently for basic versus applied research.We will investigate these questions by building and analyzing mathematical models that incorporateelements of information theory, economics, forecasting assessment, and statistics. In the long run, thiswork will deepen our understanding of science as a social process by revealing how scientific institutionsgenerate incentives that shape the direction of scientific inquiry. More immediately, it will provide atheoretical framework to explore how possible changes to the peer‐review process such as registeredreports or pre‐print servers may change scientists' collective process of learning and discovery. Finally,we will develop an online module to help readers become savvier consumers of the scientific literature,and we will share our findings with the editorial board of a leading biological journal.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.