Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
Regarding &quot;literally everyone does it&quot; (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it&#x27;s very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. <i>Especially</i> at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact journals about (we&#x27;re talking Nature&#x2F;Science here) could have easily been generated by dead cells instead of living ones, i.e. they had been staring at artifacts for years to draw conclusions on protein content, mechanisms, and so on. Of course, upon learning this, her boss quickly set upon contacting the journals in question to issue an apology and retract the relevant papers, thanked her for noticing the mistake, and everything went back in order. Just kidding, he told her to shut up if she wanted to keep her job.<p>Interesting fact: the majority of the impact factor values of big-name journals (Nature, Science, Cell and co.) comes from a few select high-impact papers. Most of the rest goes relatively uncited. The reason is, most of these papers are not astounding but simply make it through the editorial system because the big shots in charge of the labs know the editors. Not that these papers themselves are devoid of merit (though I know my fair share of Nat&#x2F;Sci&#x2F;Cell papers that happen to be 80-100% bunk), but they wouldn&#x27;t have made it to such highly selective journals otherwise. These journals also happen to have an usually high retraction rate. I have friends working in the aforementioned big-shot labs that are jaded to tte point that they just dismiss most thing coming out of Science.<p>And that&#x27;s just my area and that of people I know. Things go very awry in medicine or anything related to cancer where the pressure is so high, the field so competitive, the scientific questions so complicated, the experiments so hard to reproduce and the incentives to publish so exacerbated (note that medical journals generally have the highest impact factors). And I can&#x27;t even begin to imagine what goes on in psychology.<p>Plus, the pay is lousy.