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      Meta-research: Evaluation and Improvement of Research Methods and Practices

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          Abstract

          As the scientific enterprise has grown in size and diversity, we need empirical evidence on the research process to test and apply interventions that make it more efficient and its results more reliable. Meta-research is an evolving scientific discipline that aims to evaluate and improve research practices. It includes thematic areas of methods, reporting, reproducibility, evaluation, and incentives (how to do, report, verify, correct, and reward science). Much work is already done in this growing field, but efforts to-date are fragmented. We provide a map of ongoing efforts and discuss plans for connecting the multiple meta-research efforts across science worldwide.

          Abstract

          Meta-research is the science of evaluating how to do, report, verify, correct, and reward scientific investigation. Many initiatives focus on these important issues, and more can be done.

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          Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws.

          The long-held but erroneous assumption of never-ending rapid growth in biomedical science has created an unsustainable hypercompetitive system that is discouraging even the most outstanding prospective students from entering our profession--and making it difficult for seasoned investigators to produce their best work. This is a recipe for long-term decline, and the problems cannot be solved with simplistic approaches. Instead, it is time to confront the dangers at hand and rethink some fundamental features of the US biomedical research ecosystem.
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            The top 100 papers.

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              Estimates of the Continuously Publishing Core in the Scientific Workforce

              Background The ability of a scientist to maintain a continuous stream of publication may be important, because research requires continuity of effort. However, there is no data on what proportion of scientists manages to publish each and every year over long periods of time. Methodology/Principal Findings Using the entire Scopus database, we estimated that there are 15,153,100 publishing scientists (distinct author identifiers) in the period 1996–2011. However, only 150,608 ( 1000 citations in the same period. Skipping even a single year substantially affected the average citation impact. We also studied the birth and death dynamics of membership in this influential UCP core, by imputing and estimating UCP-births and UCP-deaths. We estimated that 16,877 scientists would qualify for UCP-birth in 1997 (no publication in 1996, UCP in 1997–2012) and 9,673 scientists had their UCP-death in 2010. The relative representation of authors with UCP was enriched in Medical Research, in the academic sector and in Europe/North America, while the relative representation of authors without UCP was enriched in the Social Sciences and Humanities, in industry, and in other continents. Conclusions The proportion of the scientific workforce that maintains a continuous uninterrupted stream of publications each and every year over many years is very limited, but it accounts for the lion’s share of researchers with high citation impact. This finding may have implications for the structure, stability and vulnerability of the scientific workforce.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                PLoS Biol
                PLoS Biol
                plos
                plosbiol
                PLoS Biology
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1544-9173
                1545-7885
                2 October 2015
                October 2015
                : 13
                : 10
                : e1002264
                Affiliations
                [001]Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America
                Author notes

                The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Article
                PBIOLOGY-D-15-01537
                10.1371/journal.pbio.1002264
                4592065
                26431313
                64d579fa-d7b1-4323-9656-8fab07b92915
                Copyright @ 2015

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

                History
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 2, Pages: 7
                Funding
                The authors received no specific funding for this work. METRICS is funded by a grant by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
                Categories
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                Life sciences
                Life sciences

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