ArticleRoyal Society open science2018
Modelling science trustworthiness under publish or perish pressure.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
55 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 224 citations in OpenAlex.
- Behavioral interventions for waste reduction: a systematic review of experimental studies.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Meta-analysis of (single-cell method) benchmarks reveals the need for extensibility and interoperability.Genome biology · 2023Pooled it
- The Cooperation Databank: Machine-Readable Science Accelerates Research Synthesis.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Pooled it
- In the current research landscape academic and scholarly journals have outlived their usefulness.Physical and engineering sciences in medicine · 2026Article
- Prompt injection in manuscripts: exploiting loopholes or crossing ethical lines?Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- Validation of human kallikrein 6 in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with progressive and non-progressive alzheimer's disease: correlation with other biomarkers.Clinical proteomics · 2026Article
- Navigating Academic Identity: A Qualitative Exploration of Graduate Students' Conference Participation Behaviors and Academic Socialization Processes.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The publish or perish, publish and perish, publish then perish, and now retract and perish cultures in academia.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Article
- How recent is recent? Retrospective analysis of suspiciously timeless citations.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2025Article
- Toward Reliable and Reproducible Research in Organic Photocatalysis by Carbon Nitride.ACS catalysis · 2025Review
- Incomplete reporting and spin in acupuncture randomised controlled trials: a cross-sectional meta-epidemiological study.BMJ evidence-based medicine · 2025Article
- Transparency, bias, and reproducibility across science: a meta-research view.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2024Article
- Towards replicability and sustainability in cancer research.BJC reports · 2024Review
- Article
- Is biomedical research self-correcting? Modelling insights on the persistence of spurious science.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Why do 'Trustworthy' Living Systematic Reviews Matter?The Journal of manual & manipulative therapy · 2023Article
- Consistency between trials presented at conferences, their subsequent publications and press releases.BMJ evidence-based medicine · 2023Article
- A field-wide assessment of differential expression profiling by high-throughput sequencing reveals widespread bias.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Predicting treatment outcome in depression: an introduction into current concepts and challenges.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2023Review
- Quality Output Checklist and Content Assessment (QuOCCA): a new tool for assessing research quality and reproducibility.BMJ open · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Scientific publication is immensely important to the scientific endeavour. There is, however, concern that rewarding scientists chiefly on publication creates a perverse incentive, allowing careless and fraudulent conduct to thrive, compounded by the predisposition of top-tier journals towards novel, positive findings rather than investigations confirming null hypothesis. This potentially compounds a reproducibility crisis in several fields, and risks undermining science and public trust in scientific findings. To date, there has been comparatively little modelling on factors that influence science trustworthiness, despite the importance of quantifying the problem. We present a simple phenomenological model with cohorts of diligent, careless and unethical scientists, with funding allocated by published outputs. This analysis suggests that trustworthiness of published science in a given field is influenced by false positive rate, and pressures for positive results. We find decreasing available funding has negative consequences for resulting trustworthiness, and examine strategies to combat propagation of irreproducible science.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.