An interesting article on the current academic climate in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad: biologists complain about the pressure in the current academic climate not to try to replicate (let alone refute) other scientists' results, but to exaggerate the results of your own research.
"In my field there are articles in Nature, Cell or Science, of which all experienced people know: this can't be right," says Hans Clevers, director of the Hubrecht Instituut in Utrecht and former president of the Dutch Academy of Science, "but rarely does somebody write that explicitly in an article. So every now and again I am approached at a conference by a PhD researcher from a remote university who has been trying for years to replicate that publication. It is very inefficient." [...] Ecologist Raymond Klaassen of Groningen University blames the "short-winded academic climate, that focuses on scoring." "If you find a deviating pattern in one year, then the current practice is to publish that with a lot of ballyhoo in as high-ranking a journal as you can."The Dutch word used in the original article (which I translated here as "short-winded") is "hijgerig": from hijgen, Dutch for "to pant". It evokes an image of heavy competition and short-termism. It reminds me of the atmosphere at a high-ranking Dutch university that has made quite a name in behavioural economics: scoring was the norm, in the best economics journals, but I saw little of a long-term research agenda. Nevertheless, I don't believe it got as bad there as the biologists describe in this article (knock on wood). I do see it in fisheries science: 2048, anyone?
