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

科学为研究自然提供了一个非常强大的工具，自然也为科学家提供了无穷无尽的研究课题。面对如此丰富的研究成果，科学家们必须定期选择他们的努力方向：哪些问题要继续研究，哪些问题留待以后解决;哪些结果要准备发表，哪些要搁置，等等。在做出这些决定时，研究人员面临着科学资助者和科学期刊通过同行评审过程创造的激励措施，资助者和期刊使用这些激励措施来确保他们支持和发表的科学的质量。然而，我们对科学资助和出版中的同行评议所产生的激励如何塑造个人研究者的科学活动，以及这些决定如何扩大到影响科学创造的总知识的了解甚少。在这个项目中，我们将发展新的数学理论来理解科学资助者和期刊所产生的激励如何影响个人科学活动和随后的科学知识生产。这一理论将为评估对出版或出版实践提出的改进提供基础，并为理解这些变化是否会推动科学事业走向对自然世界更可靠和更广泛的理解提供基础。首先，期刊的出版决策如何塑造读者从科学文献中学习的能力？第二，由资助和出版结构产生的激励机制如何激励科学家从事某些项目而回避其他项目？对于每一个问题，我们将询问同行评议过滤器在基础研究和应用研究中的作用有何不同。我们将通过构建和分析数学模型来研究这些问题，这些模型包含了信息论、经济学、预测评估和统计学的元素。从长远来看，这项工作将加深我们对科学作为一个社会过程的理解，揭示科学机构如何产生激励，塑造科学探究的方向。更直接的是，它将提供一个理论框架来探索同行评审过程的可能变化，如注册报告或预印本服务器可能会改变科学家的集体学习和发现过程。最后，我们将开发一个在线模块，帮助读者成为科学文献的精明消费者，我们将与领先生物学期刊的编辑委员会分享我们的发现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.