ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Competition for priority harms the reliability of science, but reforms can help.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 9 papers.
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
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Article
- Novelty, Consistency, Transparency: The Trilemma of Psychological Sciences and its Consequences on Open Science Practices.International review of social psychology · 2025Article
- Research integrity during the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives of health science researchers at an Academic Health Science Center.Accountability in research · 2023Article
- Is Open Science Neoliberal?Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Critical appraisal of systematic reviews of intervention studies in periodontology using AMSTAR 2 and ROBIS tools.Journal of clinical and experimental dentistry · 2023Review
- From evolutionary ecosystem simulations to computational models of human behavior.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
- Systemic problems require systemic solutions: the need for coordination and cooperation to improve research quality.BMC research notes · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Incentives for priority of discovery are hypothesized to harm scientific reliability. Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by developing an evolutionary agent-based model of a competitive scientific process. We find that rewarding priority of discovery causes populations to culturally evolve towards conducting research with smaller samples. This reduces research reliability and the information value of the average study. Increased start-up costs for setting up single studies and increased payoffs for secondary results (also known as scoop protection) attenuate the negative effects of competition. Furthermore, large rewards for negative results promote the evolution of smaller sample sizes. Our results confirm the logical coherence of scoop protection reforms at several journals. Our results also imply that reforms to increase scientific efficiency, such as rapid journal turnaround times, may produce collateral damage by incentivizing lower-quality research; in contrast, reforms that increase start-up costs, such as pre-registration and registered reports, may generate incentives for higher-quality research.
Indexed as
Identifiers
33510392What 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.