If anything I've heard the other thing - that it's hard to get published unless something is novel enough. There's not much interest in studies that just confirm or slightly extend, which is why reproducibility becomes an issue.
Bias Against Novelty in Science
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#12Yep. Professor in molecular biology here. Been at numerous universities you know. I can confirm very unscientific groupthink as the main driver of science progress nowadays. Being a lone wolf, rogue isn't really a viable option given the funding climate. Perfect sheep extends all the way from college to the professor level. Think this would surprise most lay people given the conception of scientists as off in their o…
I think a number of things contribute to the rise(?) of groupthink in the sciences (particularly in biology). One is the increasing age [0] of the peers in the peer review systems. Younger people are typically willing (and able) to perform more risky novel research. However, the biggest single factor is the drop in science funding, which leads to fear and an inherently conservative response (on the part of both grant applicants and reviewers).
[0] http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2009/12/03/nih-grants-by-...
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#13Yep. Professor in molecular biology here. Been at numerous universities you know. I can confirm very unscientific groupthink as the main driver of science progress nowadays. Being a lone wolf, rogue isn't really a viable option given the funding climate. Perfect sheep extends all the way from college to the professor level. Think this would surprise most lay people given the conception of scientists as off in their o…
This is the beginning of the end of life sciences research.
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#14If anything I've heard the other thing - that it's hard to get published unless something is novel enough. There's not much interest in studies that just confirm or slightly extend, which is why reproducibility becomes an issue.
Somewhat novel research is fine, just as long as it conforms to what is expected. Novel AND counter to the expectations of the field is much harder to publish.
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#15My preconceptions here are the reverse - that mundane studies seeking to replicate existing studies to confirm their findings are boring, and as such are not pursued or funded, despite their importance. I understand that 'novel' is being used in a slightly different context here, though.
In biological sciences it's a well known secret that most of what you write your grants on is for work that you've already done. This is not about being "boring" vs interesting. It's pragmatism to survive and get funding.
Thats interesting. Thats how a friend of mine who's finishing up her major in biology explained it when she told me about how her professors lab got grants.
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#16Yep. Professor in molecular biology here. Been at numerous universities you know. I can confirm very unscientific groupthink as the main driver of science progress nowadays. Being a lone wolf, rogue isn't really a viable option given the funding climate. Perfect sheep extends all the way from college to the professor level. Think this would surprise most lay people given the conception of scientists as off in their o…
This is the beginning of the end of life sciences research.
Meh, "Science advances one funeral at a time", today is no different than it ever really was. Nice thing about science, though, is that it does advance and one funeral at a time is relatively quick, as compared to religions, governments, and DMV lines.
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#17Yep. Professor in molecular biology here. Been at numerous universities you know. I can confirm very unscientific groupthink as the main driver of science progress nowadays. Being a lone wolf, rogue isn't really a viable option given the funding climate. Perfect sheep extends all the way from college to the professor level. Think this would surprise most lay people given the conception of scientists as off in their o…
I think a number of things contribute to the rise(?) of groupthink in the sciences (particularly in biology). One is the increasing age [0] of the peers in the peer review systems. Younger people are typically willing (and able) to perform more risky novel research. However, the biggest single factor is the drop in science funding, which leads to fear and an inherently conservative response (on the part of both grant…
There is also the whole NPM-ish attempts at using things like publication frequency and number of references to gauge the ROI on research, and therefore the performance of the scientists involved.
All this runs smack into Cambell's law.
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#18Good! There should be a bias against new things until the new things are proven to be correct.
Optimizing science based on "what do people who want to get tenure want" seems like a great way to be bad at science.
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#19My preconceptions here are the reverse - that mundane studies seeking to replicate existing studies to confirm their findings are boring, and as such are not pursued or funded, despite their importance. I understand that 'novel' is being used in a slightly different context here, though.
I think an interesting dichotomy exists here and you touch on it.
Studies that seek to replicate/ confirm work are rarely funded. Similarly studies that are too radical from more standard paradigms are also neglected.
It seems that incremental novelty that can logically be inferred tends to be the most attractive to funding agencies/ review committees.
In some ways it seems a bit like a bell curve with the probability of being funded (y axis) vs the radical nature of the proposed research (x axis).
This is an oversimplified view but something that struck me.
Re: Bias Against Novelty in Science
#20Their full paper is here http://cepr.org/sites/default/files/news/CEPR_FreeDP_180416.... . If I followed it correctly they measure "novelty" by:
- bucketing citations into journals
- building a network of journals with edge weights defined by the number of papers that cite both journals
- Using cosine similarity between journals (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Similarity_(network_science)#C... ) in this network to define how banal it is to cite them together
- For a new paper, they recompute this matrix and define novelty by summing 1-banality over the new edges
I don't know if their method reduces to a standard thing from network science (eg. betweenness, centrality, ?) but I would not be surprised if it did.
A closely-related paper with a totally-different writing style did something like this a few years back:
"Citing for High Impact" https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/citations-jcdl10.pd...