Criteria for funding and promotion leads to bad science

Scientists are trained to carefully assess theories by designing good experiments and building on existing knowledge. But there is growing concern that too many research findings may be wrong. New research conducted by psychologists at the universities of Bristol and Exeter suggests that this may happen because of the criteria that seem to be used in funding science and promoting scientists, which place too much weight on eye-catching findings. According to their findings, released 10 November in open-access journal PLOS Biology, some scientists are becoming concerned that published results are inaccurate - a recent attempt by 270 scientists to reproduce the findings reported in 100 psychology studies (the Reproducibility Project: Psychology) found that only about 40 per cent could be reproduced. Professor Marcus Munafò from Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology and Dr Andrew Higginson from Exeter, concluded that we shouldn't be surprised by this, because researchers are incentivised to work in a certain way if they want to further their careers. Their study showed that scientists aiming to progress should carry out lots of small, exploratory studies because this is more likely to lead to surprising results. The most prestigious journals publish only highly novel findings, and scientists often win grants and get promotions if they manage to publish just one paper in these journals, which means that these small (but unreliable) studies may be disproportionately rewarded in the current system.