Like any field and probably contrary to beliefs, life in
research is very frustrating. The chances of success are minimal. The scientists
not only need to worry about the failed experiments but also worry about the
peer pressure, the rat race to publish and publish for the sake of getting new
grants and also continuance of the old grants. After all a scientist is worth
how much grants he has or how many publications he has.
But in doing all this, we as scientific community are doing
a great disservice to the field of science. Many of the published articles are
either not genuine or are not reproducible. The beauty of research is that an
observation in one part of the world can and should be faithfully reproduced
anywhere else provided the reagents are of the same quality and of course the
experiments are repeated as were done in the original research. However, still,
most of the research goes the non-reproducible way!!! Now this is a big blot on
the credibility of the scientific research community. The basic research is the
template on which newer medicines would be based. And one recent article in
Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-idUSBRE82R12P20120328)
highlights the pitfalls of such a alarming scenario.
There needs to be a mechanism that would and should delink a
scientists’ credibility from the number of research articles published
otherwise this problem can take a serious turn for the worse!!!!
True, but did we ever think who created this rat race? Since many group compete for the similar research, the workers are forced to produce data quickly so that one can publish before the other group do. This is where we compromise with the quality. The question is how to reduce or eliminate this problem. In my opinion scientist need to talk to each other who work in similar area and try to reduce this rat race of publishing first!
ReplyDeleteExactly, We all know how many of the research that gets published are not of good quality. The case highlighted in the above article talks about big ticket discoveries in world's most reputed journals, one can imagine what would be the fate of articles in medium rung journals. Radha Raman, I also think we as scientists are also to be blamed for being selfish (just imagine how authors world over fight for the coveted 'first authorship' in research articles from the same lab)So the rat race begins in the lab itself!!!
ReplyDeleteScientists need to be more mature to talk to peers and evolve a mechanism where we give importance to all the authors and as you suggested try and reduce the rat race!