As with everything to do with smart people it is all about incentives. If you create a system where accuracy of results don’t matter and where you must publish or die then don’t be surprised if what you get are lots of crap publications with dubious or false results. Hoping for a different outcome without changing the incentives is fantasy thinking.<p>The positive is there is lots we could do to change the incentives, but there are some powerful forces benefiting from the current structure.<p>Edit. I should actual say what we could do. We need to focus on the incentives rather than the problem. Fix the incentives and the problem goes away on its own, focus on the problem and you just end up shifting it to somewhere else - the &quot;squeezing on the balloon&quot; effect.<p>The best solution in my opinion is to move from our crude &quot;most publications = funding&quot; model to a hurdle + lottery model. With this you have to publish enough to prove that you are capable of doing good research (the hurdle) and once you have done this you go into a lottery from which we pull out grant winners until we have used up all the funding available.<p>The reason this idea is not popular is it would not work in favour of the current grant winners.