So you wanted to be a scientist? Let me tell you what's happening in academia today!

in #science7 years ago (edited)

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I started in the academic world full of ideas and ideals. I intended to solve global warming and discovery different alternatives to oil as fuel.
The very word "scientific" is an adjective that gives importance and authority, but there is an inflation and erosion of the values of the process of scientific discovery.
In my career as a researcher I have noticed that there are harmful trends in the scientific and academic world that hinder the development of the potential of many people. I think it is a great loss for everyone and we must discuss solutions. One of my goals with my Steemit.com account is to open this debate.

Today I will only mention one of the aspects which is happening:
"The competition to appear as an author in a maximum of publications".
Your value as a candidate to obtain scholarships or financing for projects depends mostly on your publications (author of articles, book chapter, reports, patents, or plans, etc.). The more the better!
Do you see potential for abuse ...?

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When I found out about this need to publish, I had just graduated from Chemistry and my mind began to make calculations of time and work. If you work in the scientific field and you are very efficient, you could have conclusive results of your research and present the results in one or two articles each year. This could demonstrate sufficient academic, professional, scientific or research merit and be positively qualified for any funding.

Then I found, to my surprise, that my colleagues published 3 or 4 articles per year! How do they do that? What am I doing wrong?
Nothing, my first surprise was that they were playing another strategy.
Their strategy was to create and publish lots and lots of papers no matter the content. If since the previous publication they changed a variable; bingo! Another publication! If they analyzed their product from another angle, another publication! And so on.
I was puzzled, because there are people who in this way fatten their curriculum very much with material of relatively low consequence.
This is generating important academic inflation!

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[In a next post I will explain the role of scientific magazines, what happens with the copyright, and the advantages offered by open access].

But, really the contribution to the field of knowledge is almost nil.
They publish and study things that do not solve any problems, nor offer real solutions to society.
For example; If you live in Latin America why do you study and publish about the Australian kangaroo? Science and academia are often disconnected from society.

When I understood that the game of publishing without meaning was not my thing I decided to change and look for answers in biotechnology.
I started preparing in this field and then worked with a multidisciplinary team of engineers, biologists, pharmacists and chemists.
It was really great!

The number of ideas and solutions we wanted to bring to the oil remediation area was promising.
We were committed to the job, we designed a plan, and we were predicting good results.
When starting to look for money to develop the project a government company was interested in financing us.
In fact they did, we were working 1 year to get the first results.
But we found to our surprise that after that time the company stated that it was withdrawing for "X" reason.
Well, it happens ... Our team disbanded and we could not finish the whole investigation.
During that year, however, we had presented the whole plan of work to the company that financed us...

Imagine our surprise when, after a year, this company had filed 3 patents in the USA Patent Office with our complete investigation!!!
Yes, they paid us while we gave them our ideas and then they stayed and exploited them ... despite all our legal efforts we did not recover the copyright of our ideas.
Que Putada!!!

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Then you wonder, can you steal ideas?
The answer is YES, of course!

In this case it was a big fish taking advantage of a smaller one, but believe me this happens every day at all levels.

This opens your eyes, unfortunately I have seen it more times than I would have liked.
There are researchers and academics who in their eagerness to publish can steal not only ideas, but also the entire results from their co-workers.

I have also had very hardworking colleagues who have found excellent results in their research projects, even publishing patents.
But they have been coerced by their tutors to sign that they waive any benefit that the patent may generate in the future. Another theft of ideas on a large scale. The result of all this is a pyramid game, in return of years of slavery work (endless hours and super demanding for very low salaries in certain cases) you receive as payment a paper with the fancy title of PhD, which is supposed to guarantee a good job (more about the lousy job market for scientists later).

This is the tip of the iceberg if you compare it with the number of articles that offer false and impossible to duplicate results. The macro problem is that entire fields of science are losing credibility, you can only trust some researchers (which you learn from hard experience), and not all the results of published scientific articles can be relied upon anymore.

In recent years, initiatives to avoid this tendency has been seen. Firstly by the commissions evaluating scholarship and funding programs. They ask you to be the main author of your publication (many co-authors actually had little to do with the paper). They like you to do research in qualified study centers, where you need to present preliminary results annually, etc.

But I think ethical training is needed in scientific careers; It also takes some humanity and collaboration. It is not enough just to be a lone genius, you have to work in teams to accomplish true scientific progress.

I think there are many things to improve!! What is your opinion?

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Thank you for bringing this up.

For me, this issue is so tired, I don't even feel like mentioning it. The "publish or perish" mentality is in the core of Japanese academia. Institutions get financed for their research output, and there is very little control over the quality of that output (recently, the ministry of education started to address copy and pasting as well as other unethical research and publishing techniques some of which you mentioned, so I have to give them credit for that).

I know that large institutions in Japan also hire based on a point system. Basically, they look at your resume, and the first thing they do is count the number of publications, presentations, etc. Each achievement is worth a certain number of points. The people with the most points go in one pile, with fewer points - in the garbage can. This system is necessary when you have to process over 1000 applications, but as you can assume easily abusable, and that's exactly what is happening. Plus, everyone gets absolutely obsessed with presentations and publications to somehow beef up their resume and show they are active researchers.

Thanks for your comment.
Unfortunately, I have heard that confidence in the results of the paper from Japan (and much more from China) has gone down a lot.
But indeed here in Spain happens the same, quantity above quality.
These systems reward speed and volume of production over the true scientific value of their work.
I think the problem is that recruiters don't have the time to really look into the quality of the publications, so they go for easy metrics.

quantity above quality

That seems to be valid for every parts of 'modern' societies. I hate it. Research, work processes have to be fast and cheap instead of focusing on quality, thoroughness and real understanding.

Well, the Japanese research community is doing a good job to keep it contained within Japan - likely to avoid further embarrassment (the Obokata incident, anyone?). I frankly speaking cry when I read articles from humanities here (that's my field, I won't speak for sciences), and you can't but hang your head in despair looking at some graduate theses... I mean, really... Good job devaluating PhDs and Master's even further. As if the production line style of university graduation rates were not harming degree value enough.

Ah, time to go to bed... Can't get too excited here. Japan is a beautiful country if you can do like the three famous monkeys.

Yes, it is sad! It is not the fault of the people, but clearly the system has serious issues.
It pains me that everyone is keeping silent, and even simple questions are not welcome about regarding what this system is doing for us.
This lack of curiousity about our own science system itself is the most unscientific attitude you can imagine.
Talking about this issue, quickly gets you labelled as a subversive, here I thought it was up to scientists to investigate and experiment to find better solutions.

The power of consensus is indeed terrifying.

Yes! Exactly!

There was an excellent article by @kyriacos discussing the shenanigans going on in science today:
https://steemit.com/science/@kyriacos/science-under-attack

Yes, this is incredible. The academia is so corrupt, it's unbelievable. Maybe the scientific human spirit can rise again in free association - free speech - and free networking platforms like steemit.

The more people are become scientist the more bad and good scientists exist. It's a quastion of moderation.

yes and no, I think very much like steemit, behaviour is a consequence of incentives. people observe what gets them ahead in life and try to do that to see if it works.
It is difficult to be an idealist if you don't have a job...
But on a macro scale I think that academia is making itself fast irrelevant, they are eroding their own basis for their respectability and in a few years we will hear laments "nobody respects science anymore". I wonder why...

But on a macro scale I think that academia is making itself fast irrelevant, they are eroding their own basis for their respectability and in a few years we will hear laments "nobody respects science anymore"

It's already becoming a reality! :

https://steemit.com/science/@rieki/is-science-just-another-religion-21st-century-dogma-faith-in-science-and-the-cult-of-objectivity-1498976562-7605853

O wow, epic post and your reply is equally epic. Will need a clearer head to give a sensible reply!

Yea, people abuse stupid rules.

We, as humans are corrupt, not surprising that anything we build is a corrupt system. And there it leads us? We are destroying the planet, our home. So we think that we should do something with corrupt institutions we are created and reinvent same demon again and again.


Great post! This confirms what I was telling someone on another post about the science being "settled," as some politicians would have us believe when trying to promote scams like the Paris Peace Accord. My point was, do not tell me the science is settled, and then hide behind environmentalism to justify forcing an unnecessary and unproductive tax scheme on the public, and then act like I am morally bankrupt if I refuse to go along with it. I went on to summate the process that you just described in great detail into a few sentences as reason to doubt "the science" regarding this matter. Thanks for the confirmation.


I couldn't agree more. See my original reply to this article above for what I wrote...

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My opinion is that academia and scientism is a thinking man's NASCAR, an intellectual brothel, and a gambling casino for intelligentsia.

You aren't going to find morality and honesty in academia any more than you will find it in organized crime syndicates.

At least robbers have been known to have "honor among thieves."

It's debatable whether organized, academic, scientific pursuits have as good a reputation. Scientists are probably better respected than lawyers and politicians and bureaucrats, but less so than pole dancers and beauticians.

Have you considered going into the fashion or hospitality sectors?

I don't know if my tears are from laughing so hard or crying about how sadly true your comments are

My tongue was hurting, being inside my cheek for that long of a cynical post. Lolol

wow so true. I gave up trying to pursue a PhD after what I've seen happening in the academia. Still trying real hard to convince my wife not to continue down the rabbit hole. Considering the expense of all the time and effort you spent only to have someone suck you dry, geez, totally not worth it.

At the end of the day, it's all about the $$$. Sigh....

☝"Ethical training is needed in scientific careers" That describes your blogpost very well.

What a topic! Don't get me started :)
I'm so sick of it...

You're right about everything. Sometimes is possible to investigate in order to solve some problems (to some extent) but forget about fundamental research.

"It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964" - Peter Higgs
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Oh, why am I not surprised about the scientific community? This world is fucked up on so many levels because of money and our greed... :/ Thanks for sharing this!

Seu comentário reflete completamente meu pensamento. posso ser um sonhador mas ainda tenho esperança no ser humano.

This is where Google translate becomes handy :)) I have started to become more of a pessimist lately.

Welcome to corporate science. I recall two editors resigned - from the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine - for the same reason: they were sick of publishing fake science sponsored by their advertisers.

Thanks for your comment. It is nice to see that some people still have integrity but I have to wonder how many articles have been published that are shaky...

Oh, if I recall was over 50% junk. It can all be searched - i just can't recall their names.

The deeply serious issue is that the public are sold this naive notion that "science will correct itself" and therefore any fraud is temporary, but that is just not true. Try to research anything leading edge that is not approved by the current dogma and you are going to have a hard life. On the corporate side, $5 bn of profits followed by $1 bn of lawsuits - just do the maths.

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