Bad Science, Good Science

"It was the best of times,

it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom,

it was the age of foolishness,

it was the epoch of belief,

it was the epoch of incredulity,

it was the season of light,

it was the season of darkness,

it was the spring of hope,

it was the winter of despair."

--- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Has 2023 been the year of irreversible damage to Global Science lending it a Dickensian flavour of being a Tale of Two Cities?

One wonders about this looking at the preponderance of "bad science", amidst the joys of "good science" all around us. Whether it is the issue of replication crises with the much discussed now Francesca Gino case in HBS, to El Pais reporting that 1000 researchers were dropped from the Clarivate list of most cited globally given spurious overseas affiliations and fraudulent practices to the continuing spectre of predatory journals and conferences (ala the MDPI kinds), or even the phenomenon of journal or citation stacking; the gifts for scientific publishing continue to roll out from its illustrious 21st century cupboard.

This does not even include distortions & frictions in the peer review process of science, where many have now examined how that maybe broken at some margins. Add to it offcourse other existing issues, like a colleague of mine recently lamented on how the business model of funding agencies & the rankings race are spawning unintended consequences for incentives to do bad science. This includes among other things coercive citations, variations in these activities by LMICs & OECD nations, heterogeneities among various scientific fields, professional hierarchies and even by gender or ethnicity (with due acknowledgement to those arguing also for decolonizing science).

Recent news show that financing this ecosystem of bad science also is engendering misallocation of resources in developing economies, with policies being devised by science-illiterate but hubris minded policy makers trying to claim national supremacy in the era of deglobalisation.

A classic example of misallocation was how it was reported recently that India spent $50 million in open access fees in 2020, when Patrick Gaule and his co-author have shown in 2011 that, open science does not necessarily spike up citations. One wonders then if that money could have been spent better by funding doctoral & postdoctoral research in an ecosystem where funding graduate and postgraduate research has remained a severe constraint amidst scientific inequality between elite and non-elite universities within/across LMICs.

So are there no remedies up ahead towards purging out "bad science" for "good science" as 2024 beckons?

For starters, maybe all hope is not lost and this is while cautiously observing the likely advent of AI & what it may do to scientific publishing. A suggestive list of 5 remedies are provided below, one should sincerely hope there are many more:

1. Dedicated Offices: Journals & universities, indeed even research evaluation bodies like Research England are pondering about replication evaluation more formally, setting up dedicated offices & spending on professional data scientists & staff in this space.
2. Citizen Bespoke Science: This is to build on bespoke efforts from citizen scientific sentinels like ReplicationWatch & DataColada. National Science and Innovation bodies need to however step in here too in sync recognizing this preponderance of bad science and its many heterogeneities, increasingly pervasive over time and especially in economies catching up in science without proper institutional safeguards.
3. International Monitoring of Bad Science: Point 2 is especially important when countries like US, UK & EU are pondering international collaborations in science & science funding and absent international monitoring, there might be risky spillovers of "bad science" in one region of the world to another.
4. Media: The presence of more media monitoring like by El Pais will also be helpful; except that one hopes that in these days of regulation by outrage on social media, there is more careful reflection rather than knee jerk policy reactions.
5. Superstar Evangelism: Finally, one can also benefit here from global scientific superstars coming forward speaking more vociferously on this, resulting in a likely international coalition, debate and code of practice (ala the Vancouver recommendations) mitigating damage from global bad science.

In an era where science is all around us, its transfer from academia to industry increasingly being non-linear, interdisciplinary and experimental, where even our children are being told to get STEM oriented (whether we like it or not), or when mRNA, space or quantum science have made rapid advances, and not a day goes by when some miracle of science is not reported about how we are better off today (are we?) than a century back; this is the least we owe to science in 2024 and beyond.

As the Canadian Nobel Laureate chemist John Polanyi once said, nothing is so irredeemably irrelevant as bad science. Standing as science does on the shoulders of giants, surely science tomorrow would not like to continue its trust down-sliding in society going forward.

Even Dickens would be sad with that in a dystopian tale of 2 sciences emerging around the world.