The entire world of scientific papers is ridiculous and I wrote it many times.
I worked in one of the most prestigious labs in the world and seen it first hand.
And people wonder why 85%+ of papers in natural sciences are not reproducible. The incentives are all wrong in academia and science, it's just farming papers, farming citations, money and politics.
The two major wrong incentives are the pressure to publish on high impact papers for PhDs and postdocs, as their career depends on it (this gives them limited timeframes to fail and really explore), and lab funding being tied to the same incentive.
The pressure to publish is also a major factor behind tweaking data. As your PhD is ending you need those publications or you can forget an academic career. And it's a pyramid, so you need to get ahead of others in your situations. You tweak data, you pull your strings, you leverage your or your labs connections.
On top of that, add the fact that as soon as you move in any direction you are effectively entering a niche where the number of people qualified to review your paper is small, and everybody knows each other.
If you're working on helicoidal peptides as energy transmitters on metal surfaces it's a niche. Advanced perovskite synthesis? Niche. Hormonal regulation of some gland? Niche.
There can't be that many experts on pretty much any topic in science, those are all small clubs, even when you get to popular topics.
Comments
The entire world of scientific papers is ridiculous and I wrote it many times.
I worked in one of the most prestigious labs in the world and seen it first hand.
And people wonder why 85%+ of papers in natural sciences are not reproducible. The incentives are all wrong in academia and science, it's just farming papers, farming citations, money and politics.
The two major wrong incentives are the pressure to publish on high impact papers for PhDs and postdocs, as their career depends on it (this gives them limited timeframes to fail and really explore), and lab funding being tied to the same incentive.
The pressure to publish is also a major factor behind tweaking data. As your PhD is ending you need those publications or you can forget an academic career. And it's a pyramid, so you need to get ahead of others in your situations. You tweak data, you pull your strings, you leverage your or your labs connections.
On top of that, add the fact that as soon as you move in any direction you are effectively entering a niche where the number of people qualified to review your paper is small, and everybody knows each other.
If you're working on helicoidal peptides as energy transmitters on metal surfaces it's a niche. Advanced perovskite synthesis? Niche. Hormonal regulation of some gland? Niche.
There can't be that many experts on pretty much any topic in science, those are all small clubs, even when you get to popular topics.
It's a perverse system.