Bridging the ideal and real worlds of scientific publications.

If you are a non-scientist, can you remember a time when you asked a scientist about his/her job? If you ever did, I am sure you will never forget it. Most scientists ensure that it becomes memorable event of a lifetime for others. I have seen people wanting to run away as scientists get on with this. I have also noticed expressions where the listeners looked like they were about to clobber the scientist’s head at the first chance he/she looked the other way. Why are scientists so obsessed with what they do? Is the magnitude of obsession unique to the profession? Fact- this behavior is not unique to scientists or science. Everyone does it in every field. But scientists overdo self-advertisement as that is what the profession demands. You are forced to be your own mouthpiece and trumpet. 

It starts off with the demands for publishing. The efforts that go into accumulating enough data for a publication are not trivial. During this process, the practice of science is real, ideal and unbiased. Even though there are scientists who practice science solely with a view to publishing, there are also an equal number of scientists who ask valid, interesting and important questions in order to make the foundations of investigation (present and future) solid and strong. Subsequently, when one writes a paper for publication, the demands are different. Again, this comes naturally to every scientist- assembling a story that explains why the question that was addressed is important, why particular experiments were done, why they were chosen over others, and what the outcome means for people working in related areas. Scientists have to make the arguments strong, the appeal broad, and the story non-controversial.

The next round starts with selecting a journal for publication and ends with publishing it. In this stage, the demands of the publishing industry make science a different kind of social enterprise by bringing economics back into the picture (the earlier one being the search for funding an investigation/proposal). From here on, scientific information becomes an economic commodity- a fact that a lot of scientists have not fully realized even as I write this blog. It is something that practicing scientists have willingly or unwillingly served into, due to severe time constraints, lack of awareness about the existence of this parameter and most importantly due to the innocent belief (as is my case) that journals and publications are driven entirely by objectivity. The fact that publications are peer-reviewed has helped to build a trust in the current system. In addition, the current publication avenues, just like the current funding avenues have evolved over a long period of time and served the community quite well. Therefore, on the surface there seems to be nothing wrong with the enterprise. Is there room for improvement? Yes, and if I did not think so, I would not be writing this blog.

Understanding the fact that scientific knowledge is a marketable commodity would be a starting point to think about making improvements to the system. A recent essay by Neal Young in PLoS (Young et al, 2008 PLoS Med 5(10):e201.doi:10.1371/ journal.pmed.0050201) is an eye opener. Titled “Why current publication practices may distort science”, it makes compelling arguments for reconsidering “how scientific data is judged and disseminated”. The essay provides valid and interesting analogies of scientific publications to economics. It also explains the nature of the forces, their origins and associations to create an economic perspective on the commodity that we as scientists produce and deliver on a daily basis.

  To practicing scientists, reading relevant literature comes naturally. So does writing reviews, perspectives and views on papers or emerging areas summarizing the relevance of the recent findings and where the area stands, the direction it is headed and how proposed experiments would make break-throughs in an area. Again as scientists, we are aware of this practice- papers about papers- as the majority of us earnestly participate in this enterprise. However, I find that the new trend, papers on papers- how the publication industry itself functions- helps us to understand what goes behind the curtains and what factors other than pure science and its practice affect the outcome of our efforts. Reading work of this nature is important to both scientists (who generate the information that is published) and the end-users of the information (aspiring students, peers and people in industry) as impact of a work cannot be simply based on popular parameters such as citation and publication in high-impact journals.

  Even in the age of electronic publishing, high-impact journals try to create artificial scarcity, where print page limits are an excuse to reject scientific articles. Extremely low acceptance rates give status symbols to scientists to publish in those journals. It seems that the accepted flip-side of this coin namely branding, which is the accepted high value of a paper due to its presence in a popular journal, is also misleading as it frequently fails to correlate with the scientific content. Another factor, oligopoly that is practiced by journals with few publications slots determines what is selected as “visible science”. From what I understood after reading Young’s essay, a lack of awareness or acceptance of the aforementioned factors leads scientists themselves to “neglect novel ideas and independent paths for investigation” leading to herding behavior, where the actions of dominant players supercede individual information arising out of emerging investigators.

  As scientists, an awareness of these factors would help us judge our own work and that of others with a more objective mind. It will help us to discount factors that would bias our selection of a particular result or experiment over another one, merely due to the status of the result. It will also help people in the industry by bringing more objectivity into selection of studies for translation into marketable products. Most importantly, the awareness of “winner’s curse”- the effect of exaggeration of results, associations between data sets and relationships between parameters investigated (especially in high impact journals, due to the nature of their demands) on the end-users of such information would help regulatory authorities. It would make them rethink their ways and look more deeply into supporting evidence before granting public use of a technique or agent. In the cases of drugs where it takes a long time before protracted and adverse effects take time to become noticeable for the authorities to intervene, keeping an open eye and maintaining objectivity towards scientific data will serve public good. Efforts should be therefore forthcoming from all participants of science to bridge the ideal and real worlds of scientific publications.