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30 sats \ 5 replies \ @south_korea_ln 14 Apr \ parent \ on: Ethical Collapse in the Peer Review of a Leading Vaccine Journal science
Yeah, publish or perish is more alive than ever. I'm happy to work in a field of physics much less tainted by the supremacy of a single paradigm. If you repeat/confirm existing stuff, you won't get to publish in any quality journal. Novelty, questioning the current narrative, etc are key when deciding to submit a paper to a big journal.
But as your links illustrate, this seems to be much less the case in health-related fields, where big money rules what can or cannot be published. Vaccine science is a prime example of that. I think a good indicator of how much a field is prone to corruption is how close it is to political and industry influence. I have yet to meet a politician who knows anything about the kind of condensed matter physics we are studying~~
I think the extent to which human behavior can influence your study outcomes also is a big part of it.
For example, I'm sure there's a lot of money in mechanical engineering, but I'm guessing there isn't as much wiggle room there for political publishing since the subjects are not human.
A lot of the medical sciences have human subjects, and this makes study replication both expensive and difficult, and introduces a host of factors that are difficult to control, making results much more open to interpretation.
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Right. The level of "human"ity of the field is likely a very good indicator.
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Another thing that is involved, IMHO, I think, is the observer and who the observer is variable. It has been proven that results can vary according to who is observing. Two different observers will get two different results doing the exact same thing in the exact same way. This may be one reason why reproducing the results of an experiment may sometimes be very difficult.
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I think one of the big factors is companies paying for the research; when they fund they are looking for certain results, and strangely enough, they usually get them. I wonder just how that works out. Well, we kind of know how it works out, considering Thalomide, Vioxx and now it looks like Ozempic and its ilk.
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I don’t think most politicians know their heads from their a$$holes!! Let alone anything about science or economics. However, since they control the pursestrings for most state-sponsored science, they decide how to spend it. I just hope they have some good advisers in terms of science!
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