Nutrition science is real science, but unfortunately any actual nutrition science you might accidentally hear about is overwhelmed by people trying to sell a lifestyle, a book about healthy eating, or your eyeballs (to advertisers).
Ironically keto promoters are a big offender here themselves.
It's easy to study large populations and find correlations. You publish a paper, the media reports something, and that becomes the accepted wisdom. But you have no idea how to factor out all the possible confounders in your study.
It's hard to do a study where you make a change to people's diet and see if that affects health outcomes, so it is rarely done. And really that's what you need to do to see what is really going on. So what we are left with is a bunch of associations that may or may not hold up.
Each of the suggested actions, taken together, would seem to have a very positive improvement on the status quo. Would you care to explain why the suggested actions would be "somewhere between ridiculous and useless?"
Frankly, having worked in academia long enough to see at least a couple shifts in culture, the only thing I can see that comes out of this is a couple more things get added on to the ever growing checklist of publishing a paper/submitting a grant application.
I think we need to get away from the sort of thinking where large structural problems can be solved by tiny incremental improvements. If you really want to solve the problem, one or more of [Granting Agencies|Journals|Universities] has to be completely torn down and built back up.
Sort of, a huge portion of income is from grants, particularly after the first few years from being hired. More importantly, a huge portion of the University income is from grants. When a researcher recieves a grant, there is an "overhead" percentage that goes to the University. Universities hire, in part, to maximize those overheads, which means getting the researchers with the best chance at getting big grants.
Changing the hiring process may affect how PHD students act, but once they're "in the system", they are subject to all the same problematic incentives.
In my decades at it (digital side of bioinformatics) the cash flow is in the other direction.
right, and unless the new institutions are in a financial vacuum, they will remain built on and affected by broader systems, resulting in conflict of interest.
Not OP, but the proposed "solutions" not only add more work items to the ever-growing checklist (as mentioned by meow1032), but to be useful everyone must spend even more time checking everyone else's work items:
Solution 1, requiring data sharing and preregistration, greatly increases the work of peer review, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Someone needs to check that the data produces the published results and that the final analysis plan matched the preregistration. That is hard, time-consuming volunteer work, with no reward incentive. Current peer review currently trusts the authors did what they said they did, correctly, and it still takes 4-12 hours to review an article. Most reviewers cut corners. If no one does the work to check the open data or preregistrations, "open science" will be merely performative, with no quality improvement.
Solution 2, changing hiring policies to "look beyond publication and citation numbers", is pretty much what hiring committees already do. But with ~ 200 applicants per job opening the depth of examination per applicant is somewhat limited. As in solution 1, lack of time for deep checks is a problem. Applicants who are well-networked with good pre-existing reputations (i.e, who are plugged into the web of trust) get hired; everyone else doesn't. From a perspective of research quality, this may be a good thing.
Solution 3, funders fund boring / rigorous research, could improve matters in theory. But with only enough money to fund ~ 1 in 10 proposals, projected impact will always be an overwhelming concern. Proposals will include a "research integrity" section or similar and nothing substantive will change.
Solution 4, scientists "vote with their feet" (stop participating in the dysfunctional parts of the system), is a call for people to come up with their own solutions or support other proposed solutions, not a solution in its own right. Ironically, it is perhaps the most useful because it pushes back on the idea that poor quality science is inevitable under the current structure. "Perverse incentives" must not become a generally accepted excuse to sacrifice scientific integrity for the benefit of one's own career. Science is meant to discover new information. Without a culture of integrity, that information will always be suspect, regardless of what top-down interventions are attempted.
An effective intervention must reduce workload or at least break even, not increase it. Or increase the resources available. Otherwise people will be forced (actually forced, not just incentivized; there are only so many work hours each day) to cut even more corners elsewhere to make up for lost time.
Well put.
In theory, people like the idea of making science better.
In practice, people don't like the idea of fewer papers, boring papers, ambiguity in hiring and tenure, uncertainty on financial return-on-investment, and less institutional/national pride talking points.
The bad incentives and metrics we have haven't happened by chance - they have emerged from our collective desire for science to be useful, sexy, and a reliable function of money/effort spent.
that's a bit unfair. yes, it does require that in some semblance, but that's not necessarily the one and only lever we have. most of us realistically expect, i hope, that we'd need a variety of political maneuvers to move our democracy toward a more representative and less insular direction.
science is no different--it took many small steps to get into this situation, and will take many small steps to get out, any one of which will seem wholly incapable on its own.
* Maybe increases sodium intake is linked to poor health outcomes because highly processed foods are linked to poor health outcomes. We know that sodium content increases significantly during food processing and that most highly processed foods are really unhealthy.
* Maybe people in early stages of renal failure are more likely to progress to a noticeable state if they consume lots of salt. Then it would stand to reason that people with healthy kidneys have nothing to worry about.
At this point in time, many of the people in power (full professors, administration, etc) see papers as essentially useless, in part because of all the problems being discussed here. p-hacking, guest authorship, etc and so forth and so on. They're seen as a dime a dozen and somewhat ignored.
This might sound good until you understand that this means that they're dismissing the entirety of the scientific dialogue essentially, and that their alternative is grant money. My institution had training workshops for grad students where faculty would tell students that research is essentially worthless unless grant money is attached to it. The idea is that papers are a dime a dozen, and that if something is worthwhile, the feds will put their money where their mouth is so to speak.
The problem with this, of course, is that the grant system is horribly nepotistic and distorted. The biggest predictor of successful grant application last time I looked (based on empirical research in peer-reviewed journals) is co-authoring papers with someone on the review panel. Grant receipt is only weakly related to citation metrics, and from personal experience I can say that institutions are constantly encouraging researchers to inflate grant costs to bring in more indirect costs.
You could fix everything about journals and the publication process and it would do nothing about the shadow scientific world that exists in parallel that drives all the rest of the problems.
Eliminate indirect funds, require tenure of all researchers, set aside funding mechanisms for researchers that aren't tied to specific grant applications, randomize grant rewards, depriortize journals, ... there's a lot of things that need to happen.
First, about identifying bad research: The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is already practiced. It's not that "we've overturned quantum theory" articles that are causing problem - those are quickly and effectively shot down. And it is rare that the "perfectly aligns with a political interest" can be applied. The only actionable one is "see what others think about it", and it's no panacea either.
Bad and fraudulent science like the recently retracted Surgisphere covid paper is abundant. I was trying to track down the origin of the "reduce salt intake" and "limit egg consumption to no more than 2 per day / 2 per week" recommendation in the past, assuming there was hard science behind them. There isn't; and indeed they're slowly being reversed everywhere - but they were prevalent for half a century, with a lot of other research taking them as axioms.
The remdesivir trials have been p-hacked to death - anyone who took an interest was seeing it happen in real time - yet, the scientific community turns a blind eye.
The ketogenic diet is vilified in every mainstream media and most nutritional "science" publications; the headlines are rarely inline with the the actual results, but that's what people remember (Not that nutrition science is really science)
And the other recommendations about fixing it are comparable to "lets solve evils of the US 2-party system! All we have to do is make those two parties vote to take away their power". Academia and science publishing are where they are now because it benefits essentially all the incumbents (at the expense of the rest of society).
The problem description (at least in the comic) is good. Any suggested action ... not so much.