The scientific saga continues. I know, it seems like I am going off on a tangent. But I think this has all to do with the bigger picture of a more sustainable world.. Remember last week I was writing about minimalism in science output (better , the lack of it). Well, turns out It is worse than this. Yes.Because researchers fall victim of ‘following fashions’ too , so there is always the latest 'hot' topic to investigate and then there will be booms of articles on that for a while that will then bust in favour of something else.
In my field (marine ecology) now it seems to be ‘blue carbon’ , a while ago it was ocean acidification. And well , don’t shoot the messenger , but if you go on my google scholar page you will well see I fell ""victim"" of that too. Not sure if it’s a ‘scientists are like sheep’ thing , or curiosity mounting/ competitiveness (eg seeing some results and asking the questions: does this apply in this region ? With this other species ? Or can I make this model better ?) , or simply that that's where the money are (and we all know , without money not much can be achieved… ) I was already thinking about this while writing the post last week and then today (Friday) serendipity: I found a Twitter thread (what else would you do while waiting for your model to run if not going on your Twitter full of #AcademicChatter ?) revolving around a recently written paper about the ‘decline effect’ in Ocean acidification research . What is the decline effect? The decline effect is represented by large effects found in the early stages of a research field that then go to diminish as more and more research is produced . This means that at the beginning of ocean acidification studies large effects were found and by ‘the end’ (it's never truly the end of a field of research altogether but these days it’s not very much studied as it was a few years ago ..) much smaller impacts were found . Does this mean that at the beginning scientists were wrong ? Does it mean that there were fakeries? Does it mean that ocean acidification doesn’t matter at all? Some hypothesis can be put forward, from ‘lighter options’ like that as more and more studies are done they start to become better and better, as the field starts to become oversaturated and there is no more need to be ‘fast out with it’ . Other hypotheses are more concerning and hypothesise initial fraudulent results . I don’t know about this. I saw with my eyes bryozoans dissolve under very low pH levels… but one can argue it was maybe ‘unrealistic’ and a ‘lab experiment’ and things in the field are different and more nuanced , but it Could be disastrous. On the other hand some studies were accused of being fraudulent (see this interesting investigation published on science magazine ). You can also check the original Twitter thread for more insights On my side I can’t say I have the answer but surely it seems absolutely weird that there are those ‘hot topics’ that come and go . To make a comparison with life it’s a little bit like with covid , yes it’s an emergency , but stopping most of the other medical services and ignoring all sort of other illnesses it’s not a helpful response. As it isn’t discussing only covid on the newspapers ignoring all sort of other very useful news. So in science , having hot topics giving ‘cool results’ and discarding them as soon as they either aren’t that interesting (null results or story unclear, too context dependent, not ‘globally applicable’ but maybe a huge problem in a specific site) for the next thing, Is not helpful. Especially as it may only leave a big legacy of single sided research…. Again, I call for a big change to the system , the funding system but also the career advancing system which is based on number of publications and their impacts calculated as numbers of citations. Surely, a big disaster story will be a bigger hit. But it is not necessarily better science …
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