What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers | Fantastic Anachronism

peter.suber's bookmarks 2020-09-13

Summary:

[Some recommendations:]

  • Ignore citation counts. Given that citations are unrelated to (easily-predictable) replicability, let alone any subtler quality aspects, their use as an evaluative tool should stop immediately.
  • Open data, enforced by the NSF/NIH. There are problems with privacy but I would be tempted to go as far as possible with this. Open data helps detect fraud. And let's have everyone share their code, too—anything that makes replication/reproduction easier is a step in the right direction.
  • Financial incentives for universities and journals to police fraud. It's not easy to structure this well because on the one hand you want to incentivize them to minimize the frauds published, but on the other hand you want to maximize the frauds being caught. Beware Goodhart's law!
  • Why not do away with the journal system altogether? The NSF could run its own centralized, open website; grants would require publication there. Journals are objectively not doing their job as gatekeepers of quality or truth, so what even is a journal? A combination of taxonomy and reputation. The former is better solved by a simple tag system, and the latter is actually misleading. Peer review is unpaid work anyway, it could continue as is. Attach a replication prediction market (with the estimated probability displayed in gargantuan neon-red font right next to the paper title) and you're golden. Without the crutch of "high ranked journals" maybe we could move to better ways of evaluating scientific output. No more editors refusing to publish replications. You can't shift the incentives: academics want to publish in "high-impact" journals, and journals want to selectively publish "high-impact" research. So just make it impossible. Plus as a bonus side-effect this would finally sink Elsevier...."

Link:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.quality oa.citations oa.reproducibility oa.incentives oa.code oa.metrics oa.ssh oa.recommendations oa.data oa.misconduct oa.preregistration

Date tagged:

09/13/2020, 10:50

Date published:

09/13/2020, 06:50