The speed of science


Essay by Saloni Dattani & Nathaniel Bechhofer: “The 21st century has seen some phenomenal advances in our ability to make scientific discoveries. Scientists have developed new technology to build vaccines swiftly, new algorithms to predict the structure of proteins accurately, new equipment to sequence DNA rapidly, and new engineering solutions to harvest energy efficiently. But in many fields of science, reliable knowledge and progress advance staggeringly slowly. What slows it down? And what can we learn from individual fields of science to pick up the pace across the board – without compromising on quality?

By and large, scientific research is published in journals in the form of papers – static documents that do not update with new data or new methods. Instead of sharing the data and the code that produces their results, most scientists simply publish a textual description of their research in online publications. These publications are usually hidden behind paywalls, making it harder for outsiders to verify their authenticity.

On the occasion when a reader spots a discrepancy in the data or an error in the methods, they must read the intricate details of a study’s method scrupulously, and cross-check the statistics manually. When scientists don’t share the data to produce their results openly, the task becomes even harder. The process of error correction – from scientists publishing a paper, to readers spotting errors, to having the paper corrected or retracted – can take years, assuming those errors are spotted at all.

When scientists reference previous research, they cite entire papers, not specific results or values from them. And although there is evidence that scientists hold back from citing papers once they have been retracted, the problem is compounded over time – consider, for example, a researcher who cites a study that itself derives its data or assumptions from prior research that has been disputed, corrected or retracted. The longer it takes to sift through the science, to identify which results are accurate, the longer it takes to gather an understanding of scientific knowledge.

What makes the problem even more challenging is that flaws in a study are not necessarily mathematical errors. In many situations, researchers make fairly arbitrary decisions as to how they collect their data, which methods they apply to analyse them, and which results they report – altogether leaving readers blind to the impact of these decisions on the results.

This murkiness can result in what is known as p-hacking: when researchers selectively apply arbitrary methods in order to achieve a particular result. For example, in a study that compares the well-being of overweight people to that of underweight people, researchers may find that certain cut-offs of weight (or certain subgroups in their sample) provide the result they’re looking for, while others don’t. And they may decide to only publish the particular methods that provided that result…(More)”.