Editor’s Note: This is part II; part I can be found here. Professor Brian Wansink is head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. The lab has had problems, some described in an article called “Spoiled Science” in the Chronicle of Higher Education early in 2017: Four papers on which he is a … Continue reading “Peer Review: the Publication Game and “the Natural Selection of Bad Science””
The British journal Nature, home in 1953 to Watson and Crick’s important DNA paper, was by 1966 rather in the doldrums, with a backlog of submitted manuscripts and losing ground to the general-science leader, the U.S. journal Science. That year, however, the publisher appointed as editor one John Maddox, a slightly eccentric theoretical physicist and … Continue reading “How Is Science Judged? How Useful Is Peer Review?”
The Paradigm Shift Not long ago I was working with my occasional co-author, an associate dean in the school of economic, political and policy sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, on creating a campus research institute focused on spontaneous orders. That is a field that attempts to explain how social order emerges from … Continue reading “Perverse Incentives in Science: 21st Century Funding for 20th Century Research”