Why the Reward Structure of Science Makes Reproducibility Problems Inevitable

@article{Heesen2018WhyTR,
  title={Why the Reward Structure of Science Makes Reproducibility Problems Inevitable},
  author={Remco Heesen},
  journal={The Journal of Philosophy},
  year={2018},
  volume={115},
  pages={661-674}
}
  • R. Heesen
  • Published 1 December 2018
  • Philosophy
  • The Journal of Philosophy
Recent philosophical work has praised the reward structure of science, while recent empirical work has shown that many scientific results may not be reproducible. I argue that the reward structure of science incentivizes scientists to focus on speed and impact at the expense of the reproducibility of their work, thus contributing to the so-called reproducibility crisis. I use a rational choice model to identify a set of sufficient conditions for this problem to arise, and I argue that these… 
View via Publisher
api.research-repository.uwa.edu.au
41 Citations
Background Citations
18
Methods Citations
1
Results Citations
1

Figures from this paper

41 Citations

Priority and privilege in scientific discovery.

Why Do Scientists Lie?

  • L. Bright
  • Philosophy
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement
  • 2021
Abstract It's natural to think of scientists as truth seekers, people driven by an intense curiosity to understand the natural world. Yet this picture of scientists and scientific inquiry sits…

Need Not Be Accurate , Justified , or Believed by their

We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author. To defend this claim…

Scientific conclusions need not be accurate, justified, or believed by their authors

We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author. To defend this claim…

Editorial: Special Issue on Replicability in Cognitive Science

This special issue on what some regard as a crisis of replicability in cognitive science (i.e. the observation that a worryingly large proportion of experimental results across a number of areas…

The Scientific Ponzi Scheme

Fraud and misleading research represent serious impediments to scientific progress. We must uncover the causes of fraud in order to understand how science functions and in order to develop strategies…

Publish without bias or perish without replications.

  • Rafael Ventura
  • Economics
    Studies in history and philosophy of science
  • 2022

Editorial: Replicability in Cognitive Science

This special issue on what some regard as a crisis of replicability in cognitive science (i.e. the observation that a large proportion of experimental results across a number of areas cannot be…

Replicability Crisis and Scientific Reforms: Overlooked Issues and Unmet Challenges

ABSTRACT Nowadays, almost everyone seems to agree that science is facing an epistemological crisis – namely the replicability crisis – and that we need to take action. But as to precisely what to do…

The case for formal methodology in scientific reform

A formal statistical analysis of three popular claims in the metascientific literature is presented, showing how the use and benefits of such formalism can inform and shape debates about such methodological claims.

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 42 REFERENCES

How much evidence should one collect?

A number of philosophers of science and statisticians have attempted to justify conclusions drawn from a finite sequence of evidence by appealing to results about what happens if the length of that…

Rewarding Replications

  • S. KooleD. Lakens
  • Psychology
    Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
  • 2012
This article considers psychologists’ narrative approach to scientific publications as an underlying reason for this neglect and proposes an incentive structure for replications within psychology that can be developed in a relatively simple and cost-effective manner.

The Credit Economy and the Economic Rationality of Science

Theories of scientific rationality typically pertain to belief. This paper argues that we should expand our focus to include motivations as well as belief. An economic model is used to evaluate…

The role of the priority rule in science

Science’s priority rule rewards those who are first to make a discovery, at the expense of all other scientists working towards the same goal, no matter how close they may be to making the same…

Herding and the quest for credit

The system for awarding credit in science – the ‘priority rule’ – functions, I have proposed elsewhere, to bring about something close to a socially optimal distribution of scientists among…

Communism and the Incentive to Share in Science

The communist norm requires that scientists widely share the results of their work. Where did this norm come from, and how does it persist? I argue on the basis of a game-theoretic model that…

Decision Theoretic Model of the Productivity Gap

AbstractUsing a decision theoretic model of scientists’ time allocation between potential research projects I explain the fact that on average women scientists publish less research papers than men…

Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor*

Because contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel…

Scientific Collaboration: Do Two Heads Need to Be More than Twice Better than One?

Epistemic accounts of scientific collaboration usually assume that, one way or another, two heads really are more than twice better than one. We show that this hypothesis is unduly strong. We present…

Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists' Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data

The hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists' productivity but also their bias is verified, which might be observed in other countries where academic competition and pressures to publish are high.