Academia

Academic incentives and science
Gerry Carter

DO ACADEMIC
INCENTIVES
HURT SCIENCE ?

1.YES
2. Maybe- what’s the argument?
3. Huh, what are you talking about?
4. NO

What is science?
• Wikipedia: systematic enterprise that builds and
organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations
and predictions
• Dictionary: systematic knowledge of the physical world
gained through observation and experimentation

What is science?
• Wikipedia: systematic enterprise that builds and organizes
knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions
• Dictionary: systematic knowledge of the physical world gained
through observation and experimentation
• the most rigorous way of gaining new knowledge about
nature (whatever that may be), and the sum of that
knowledge
• When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and
evidence, you are thinking scientifically.(And when you’re not,
you’re not.)*
*Author: Sam Harris

science
• Rigor
• Falsifiability
• Repeatability
• Measures of uncertainty

What is academia?
• Wikipedia: the internationally recognized establishment
of professional scholars and students, usually centered
around colleges and universities, who are engaged in
higher education and research.
• the environment or community concerned with the pursuit
of research, education, and scholarship.
• the “job” of being a scholar at a university and the
community of those scholars

What is academia?
• Wikipedia: the internationally recognized establishment
of professional scholars and students, usually centered
around colleges and universities, who are engaged in
higher education and research.
• the environment or community concerned with the pursuit
of research, education, and scholarship.
• the “job” of being a scholar at a university
• By “academia”, I don’t mean teaching (vs research).
• And I don’t mean the humanities
• I mean the aspects that affect scientific research

How is scientific success different from
academic success?

What is success?
Science
= being correct, falsifiable, and repeatable
Academia
= having influence and impact, being hired, getting funding

My argument
1. Incentive structures of science are philosophical.
Examples: double-blind design, replication, and peer-review.
They are typically designed to aid scientific goals.
2. Incentives structures in academia are economic.
Examples: tenure, h-index, and journal impact factors. They
are not designed to meet scientific goals. They emerge as
byproducts of human goals and economic competition within
and among social groups.
(Economic competition exists between publishing companies, between
individuals, between labs, between departments, between universities, and
academia vs other state-funded institutions).
3. Therefore, many academic incentives  bad science.
4. Question: How can we design better academic incentive
structures so that they serve the interests of science?

My argument
1. Incentive structures of science are philosophical.
Examples: double-blind design, replication, and peer-review.
They are typically designed to aid scientific goals.
2. Incentives structures in academia are economic.
Examples: tenure, h-index, and journal impact factors. They
are not designed to meet scientific goals. They emerge as
byproducts of human goals and economic competition within
and among social groups.
(Economic competition exists between publishing companies, between
individuals, between labs, between departments, between universities,
and academia vs other state-funded institutions).
3. Therefore, many academic incentives  bad science.
4. Question: How can we design better academic incentive
structures so that they serve the interests of science?

Science and academia
have many shared incentives
To be a good scientist and a good academic…
• Do good research
• Make important discoveries
• Publish good papers
• Produce public knowledge
• Teach science to students well

As a reviewer, when do you reject a paper
for not enough significance?

As a reviewer, when do you reject a paper
for not enough significance?
What makes a paper good enough?
Science: good enough to be useful evidence for readers
Academia: good enough to be an accolade for the writer

The academic filter in biology
• 16,000 new US Biology PhD students/ year
• Of those recruits, 63% stay until they graduate
• Average time to degree = 7 years
• Of those graduates, 70% get a postdoc
• Of those postdocs, 30% do 1+ more postdoc
• Average postdoc time = ? but more than 4 years
• Within 6 years, 15% of postdocs get a tenure-track job
• We have a 6-7% chance of getting the job we were trained for.
Source: ascb.org “Where will a biology PhD take you”

Mentors: old vs. young
BUT…
…”Not exactly the sort of approach likely to reap
accolades today.”
“I doubt that I would fare particularly well in today’s
academic environment.”

Divergent interests (1 of 2)
To be a good scientist… To be a good academic…
Be skeptical of your results “Sell” your results

Interpret conclusions carefully Highlight/exaggerate importance

Publish negative results Publish “strategically”

Ignore social prestige Use impact factors to make writing
decisions

decisions
Challenge authority Cite authority. Make friends.

decisions
Replicate. Replicate. Replicate… if you must

decisions
Replicate. Replicate. Replicate… if you must
Novel exciting results are less likely to be
true. Double-check them.
Publish novel exciting results before you
get scooped.

P=0.06 P=0.04
Masicampoa & Lalande
2012 Quart J Exp Psych

P=0.06 P=0.04
Help others replicate and find flaws in
your work
Have a “territory”

P=0.06 P=0.04
your work
Be clear Sound smart

P=0.06 P=0.04
your work
“Science is a marathon, not a sprint” Funded work must be “transformative”

P=0.06 P=0.04
your work
Natural history is crucial for biological
understanding
Natural history is “low impact”

P=0.06 P=0.04
your work
understanding
Long-term goals for important truths Short-term results with high impact

P=0.06 P=0.04
your work
understanding
Long-term goals for important truths Short-term results with high impact
Build a consensus. Hot controversial topics are higher impact

What is academic impact?
• Influence on your field
• Usually involves counting citations, regardless of whether
you are being cited for being right or being wrong.
• Impact is measured at the level of journals (impact factor)
and authors (h-index)
• But actual scientific progress made by articles, methods,
hypotheses, theories, and often teams of researchers

What is academic impact?
• A fundamental problem:
• Over time, scientific validity and importance of an article
both increases and decreases.
• Measures of total impact can only increase.
• Papers that are influentially wrong have higher impact
metrics than papers that are correct.

A survey
From Daniel Dennett:
• (A) You solve the major problem of your choice so
conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks
to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you
get a footnote in history).
• (B) You write an article or book of such tantalizing
perplexity and controversy that it stays on the
required reading list for centuries to come.
Which would you choose?

Philosophers and Scientists
From Daniel Dennett:
• (A) You solve the major problem of your choice so
conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks
to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you
get a footnote in history).
• (B) You write an article or book of such tantalizing
perplexity and controversy that it stays on the
required reading list for centuries to come.
Scientists choose A. Philosophers often choose B.

Some of the most influential scholars
said little that was correct

Jacques Derrida
“Brilliant and controversial, Jacques Derrida is one
of the most important thinkers of our time, his
considerable body of work having ineradicably
altered the landscape of thought in the 20th and
21st centuries.”
• Wikipedia: best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as
deconstruction
• one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern
philosophy
• published more than 40 books, hundreds of essays
• significant influence upon the humanities and social sciences, including—in
addition to philosophy and literature—law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics,
sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, political theory, feminism, and gay and lesbian
studies…. also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music, art,
and art critics. Derrida was said to "leave behind a legacy of himself as the
'originator' of deconstruction.”

Deconstruction denies the possibility of a "pure presence": "the present or presence of
sense to a full and primordial intuition".[13][14] It thus denies the possibility of essential
or intrinsic and stable meaning and the unmediated access to "reality”.
Dictionary: a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language that
emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational
quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.

“Pluralistic ignorance”
• no one actually believes, but everyone believes that
everyone else believes
The Emperor’s
New Clothes

The anti-academic culture of science
Richard Feynman on his Nobel Prize:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e5a_1185599458

How should we change academia?

Towards a better academia…
1. Make publishing trivial. Make
peer-review rigorous.
2. Encourage replication.
3. Decentralize funding, rather than
centralized, trickle-down funding

Publishing
• Make publishing trivial. Make peer-review rigorous.
Article-level metrics.
• Get rid of impact factors, and then journals.

Journals make money from nothing

Journals are brands
In theory, the whole point of a brand is quality control. But in practice,
brands manipulate consumers into seeing high quality regardless of
actual quality.

Journals are brands
In theory, the whole point of a brand is quality control. But in practice,
brands manipulate consumers into seeing high quality regardless of
actual quality.
Journal brands serve as third-party assessment, so that readers “can
judge an article by its cover” and can outsource their evaluation of papers
to 1 editor and 2+ reviewers. But this is better accomplished by a rating
system, like we use for judging movies and books.

Public can read
Publishing
Data
Conclusions
Paper Overhyped
bullshitPicked up
by media
This is how it should work.
“Experimental
treatments affected
gut biota (p=0.01)
and were correlated
with longevity
(p=0.03)”
“Gut microbiota is
linked to longevity
in male mice”
“Ten reasons why
your microbiome is
the key to health
and long life”

Public can
read
Public can read
Publishing
Data
Conclusions
Paper Overhyped
bullshitPicked up
by media
This is how it should work.
But this is how it often works…
SPIN
Data Journal.
University
access only.
Overhyped
bullshit
SPIN
Slightly
hyped
paperWritten for
high
impact
SPIN
Journal demands
brevity and certainty

Publishing
• Get rid of journals, impact factors, and academic publishing as a
business.
• Central repository of open-access, peer-reviewed articles (and
their reviews).
• Magazines can then draw stories from those articles with
varying degrees of rigor (Nature, New Scientist, Fox News).
This is already basically how ArXive and PLOS ONE work.

Publishing
business.
• Central repository of open-access, peer-reviewed articles (and their
reviews). Magazines can then draw stories from those articles with
• Publish negative results and datasets.

Publishing
business.
• Central repository of open-access, peer-reviewed articles (and their
reviews). Magazines can then draw stories from those articles with
• Publish negative results and datasets.
• Published peer reviews. Make them objective and open access.
Focus on soundness of results, not subjective importance (which
can be assessed over time). Have standardized peer review
checklists.

Replication
• Encourage replication.
• Open data.
• Metrics to identify what is worth replicating.*
• Publish replications.

A replication crisis
Social psychology
Psychology
Biomedicine

Funding
• Decentralize funding
• Rather than centralized, trickle-down funding
• One idea: most labs receive baseline funding. Some percentage of
all funds must be invested in another lab.
Bollen et al. 2014. From funding agencies to scientific agency:
collective allocation of science funding as an alternative to peer
review. EMBO Reports.

Scientists spend about 40% of their time
chasing grants (2007 U.S. Govt study)
experimental physicist at Columbia University did the calculations:
some grants have a net negative value: they do not pay for the time
that applicants and peer reviewers spend on them.
(Dr. No Money: The Broken Science Funding System. 2011. Scientific American.)

Funding
• Decentralize funding
• Rather than centralized, trickle-down funding
• Use peer-review-like “voting” for funding.
• One idea: most labs receive baseline funding. 30% of all funds
must be invested in another lab justified by merit or promise.
.
Bollen et al. 2014. From funding agencies to scientific agency: collective
allocation of science funding as an alternative to peer review. EMBO Reports

In summary
• Academic incentives can erode good scientific practices.
• We can change academic practices. However, there
needs to be a cooperative consensus, because this is a
public goods dilemma. Like a boycott, it’s only cost-
effective, if everyone does it.
• It would be useful to enact policy changes that offset the
poor incentive structures of academia.

What do you think?
Thanks for the discussion.

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