metascience

Jenny Rohn has an article on the wasted effort into failed grant writing, which is so full of good paragraphs it's hard to figure out which one to snip: "Show me the money: Grantwriting is taking over science". Here's one:

There is some evidence that having the vast majority of scientists spend the vast majority of their time writing grants instead of doing and thinking science might be a tad inefficient, and not, perhaps, the best way to get science done. A recent correspondence in Nature about the Australian system, for example, reported that collectively, in 2012, researchers spent "more than five centuries' worth of time" writing or revising grants for the major funding scheme; as only 20.5% were successful, this account for a staggering four centuries' worth of wasted time.

I suppose if we looked at the U.S. we'd be talking about the geological timescale.

I pass this along from ScienceInsider, really too irritated for clever comment: "NSF Audit of Successful Proposals Finds Numerous Cases of Alleged Plagiarism".

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is investigating nearly 100 cases of suspected plagiarism drawn from a single year's worth of proposals funded by the agency.

The cases grow out of an internal examination by NSF's Office of Inspector General (IG) of every proposal that NSF funded in fiscal year 2011. James Kroll, head of administrative investigations within the IG's office, tells ScienceInsider that applying plagiarism software to NSF's entire portfolio of some 8000 awards made that year resulted in a "hit rate" of 1% to 1.5%. "My group is now swamped," he says about his staff of six investigators.

So...

Between 1 and 1.5% of the NSF budget is going to fund obvious plagiarists. Obvious because they can be caught with standard plagiarism filters, which are not richly seeded with scientific papers.

Because closed access stands in the way of incorporating much of the scientific literature into such databases.

And this doesn't count the incidence of grants that are given to applications proposing work that is already done.

The NSF budget is not evenly distributed among grants, and I suppose that many small grants probably contain more plagiarism than the few really big ones. Still, we're talking about $50 million or so.

UPDATE (2013-03-09): A reader writes:

I was just reading your post on plagiarism, and it made me recall something that happened to me years ago when I was a practicing biochemist. My boss received a grant to review on some work proposed by one of our competitors. He passed off a copy to me to look at (I was a postdoc at the time.) On reading the background section, there was a paragraph that sounded familiar. I did a little looking around on my computer and it turned out the reason the paragraph sounded familiar was that I had written it. But not in a paper - it was in one of our grant proposals. The material didn't concern any proposed experiments - it was just part of a short review of the state of the field, so we never did anything about it. I knew the guy who did this and he was quite capable of writing a decent paragraph himself, so I never could figure out why he borrowed my material. Anyway, it may not be enough to get all the literature in the database - they should have all the other grant proposals in there too.

This is another essential area. Probably the most common outcome is people stealing ideas from other proposals. The texts of unfunded proposals are not available to the public, which may cut down on stealing but also impedes comparing funded proposals. I tend to think that the lower the success rate, the more likely we'll see substantial cheating of one kind or another.

Zachary Schrag points to a report by the American Association of University Professors , and gives a quoted excerpt that deserves to be forwarded on: "AAUP Publishes Final Report, Regulation of Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board".

As things now stand, the IRB system assembles local committees whose members have no special competence in assessing research projects in the wide range of disciplines they are called on to assess, whose approval is required for an only minimally restricted range of research projects and who are invited to bring to bear in assessing them an only minimally restricted body of what they take to be information, who are only minimally restricted in the demands they may make on the researchers, and whose judgments about whether to permit the research to be carried out at all are, in most institutions, final. When one steps back from it, one can find oneself amazed that such an institution has developed on university campuses across the country.

Different kinds of human research raise different kinds of ethical concerns. A good aspect of the IRB process is that the board members themselves often learn a lot about the ethical issues in other fields. But the composition of particular boards can make the process of review troublingly arbitrary.

The Thesis Whisperer brings up the topic of prolonged rudeness in academic culture: "Academic assholes and the circle of niceness". When I write that it's time to "reclaim the name 'anthropology' from this earlier generation", I mean that the elite discourse within the field has become toxic. Rude behavior often yields short-term gains, but has obvious long-term costs for the discipline as a whole:

How does it happen? The budding asshole has learned, perhaps subconsciously, that other people interrupt them less if they use stronger language. They get attention: more air time in panel discussions and at conferences. Other budding assholes will watch strong language being used and then imitate the behaviour. No one publicly objects to the language being used, even if the student is clearly upset, and nasty behaviour gets reinforced. As time goes on the culture progressively becomes more poisonous and gets transmitted to the students. Students who are upset by the behaviour of academic assholes are often counselled, often by their peers, that “this is how things are done around here” . Those who refuse to accept the culture are made to feel abnormal because, in a literal sense, they are – if being normal is to be an asshole.

Not all academic cultures are badly afflicted by assholery, but many are. I don’t know about you, but seen this way, some of the sicker academic cultures suddenly make much more sense.

Yes, anthropology has been affected. Picking academic vendettas used to be a great way to get famous. The students -- at least the normal students -- suffered. The field has selected for bad behavior.

Many elite anthropologists still consider the New York Times to be an arbiter of quality work. That is, if you are featured in the Times, you are visible to the elite. Yet the Times itself has become actively hostile to cultural anthropology as a field, selecting the worst instances of bad behavior for promotion and coverage. Some of my friends have been agitated for the last week waiting breathlessly for the Times to publish letters decrying the recent coverage.

Seriously.

You know that scene in This Is Spinal Tap?

David St. Hubbins: I do not, for one, think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem *may* have been, that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being *crushed* by a *dwarf*. Alright? That tended to understate the hugeness of the object.

Ian Faith: I really think you're just making much too big a thing out of it.

Derek Smalls: Making a big thing out of it would have been a good idea.

Yeah. That one. The curtain has risen on the old band, and they're playing behind a Stonehenge monument that can be crushed by a dwarf. Please, somebody, lower the curtain.