How does science go wrong?

We are happy to announce that our abstract got accepted for the 2014 Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), which will be held in Glasgow from 3-6 September. Our paper is selected for a panel on ‘The role of ideas and indicators in science policies and research management’, organised by Luis Sanz-Menéndez and Laura Cruz-Castro (both at CSIC-IPP).

Title of our paper: How does science go wrong?

“Science is in need of fundamental reform.” In 2013, five Dutch researchers took the lead in what they hope will become a strong movement for change in the governance of science and scholarship: Science in Transition. SiT appears to voice concerns heard beyond national borders about the need for change in the governance of science (cf. The Economist 19 October 2013; THE 23 Jan. 2014; Nature 16 Oct. 2013; Die Zeit 5 Jan. 2014). One of the most hotly debated concerns is quality control, and it encompasses the implications of a perceived increasing publication pressure, purported flaws in the peer review system, impact factor manipulation, irreproducibility of results, and the need for new forms of data quality management.

One could argue that SiT landed in fertile ground. In recent years, a number of severe fraud cases drew attention to possible ‘perverse effects’ in the management system of science and scholarship. Partly due to the juicy aspects of most cases of misconduct, these debates tend to focus on ‘bad apples’ and shy away from more fundamental problems in the governance of science and scholarship.

Our paper articulates how key actors construct the notion of ‘quality’ in these debates, and how they respond to each other’s position. By making these constructions explicit, we shift focus back to the self-reinforcing ‘performance loops’ that most researchers are caught up in at present. Our methodology is a combination of the mapping of the dynamics of media waves (Vasterman, 2005) and discourse analysis (Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984).

References

A revolutionary mission statement: improve the world. Times Higher Education, 23 January 2014.

Chalmers, I., Bracken, M. B., Djulbegovic, B., Garattini, S., Grant, J., Gülmezoglu, A. M., Oliver, S. (2014). How to increase value and reduce waste when research priorities are set. The Lancet, 383 (9912), 156–165.

Gilbert, G. N., & Mulkay, M. J. (1984). Opening Pandora’s Box. A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Research evaluation: Impact. (2013). Nature, 502(7471), 287–287.

Rettet die Wissenschaft!: “Die Folgekosten können hoch sein.” Die Zeit, 5 January 2014.

Trouble at the lab. The Economist, 19 October 2013.

Vasterman, P. L. M. (2005). Media-Hype. European Journal of Communication , 20 (4 ), 508–530.