Science provides an extraordinarily powerful tool for investigating nature, and nature supplies an endless abundance of research topics that are ripe for scientists to investigate. Faced with such abundance, scientists must regularly choose where to place their efforts: which questions to pursue and which to leave for another day, which results to prepare for publication and which to set aside, and so on. When making these decisions, researchers face incentives that scientific funders and scientific journals create through the peerâ€review processes that funders and journals use to ensure quality and rigor in the science they support and publish. Yet we understand very little about how the incentives created by peerâ€review in scientific funding and publication shape the scientific activity of individual investigators, and how those decisions scale up to impact the aggregate knowledge that science creates. In this project, we will develop new mathematical theory to understand how incentives created by scientific funders and journals affect individual scientific activity and the subsequent production of scientific knowledge. This theory will provide a foundation for evaluating proposed refinements of funding or publication practices, and for understanding whether these changes will nudge the scientific enterprise towards a more reliable and expansive understanding of the natural world.
We will focus on two questions. First, how do journals' publication decisions shape the ability of their readership to learn from the scientific literature? Second, how do the incentives created by funding and publication structures motivate scientists to work on certain projects and shy away from others? For each question, we will ask how peerâ€review filters function differently for basic versus applied research. We will investigate these questions by building and analyzing mathematical models that incorporate elements of information theory, economics, forecasting assessment, and statistics. In the long run, this work will deepen our understanding of science as a social process by revealing how scientific institutions generate incentives that shape the direction of scientific inquiry. More immediately, it will provide a theoretical framework to explore how possible changes to the peerâ€review process such as registered reports or preâ€print servers may change scientists' collective process of learning and discovery. Finally, we will develop an online module to help readers become savvier consumers of the scientific literature, and we will share our findings with the editorial board of a leading biological journal.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
