Reasoning has become a luxury

It is being talked about all over the world; an editorial in the Economist of 19 October 2013 entitled " How Science Goes Wrong " reports a dramatic decline in the quality of scientific publications. Research has changed the world, now it needs to change itself, the subheading reads. The detailed report is based on facts which are difficult to disprove; an example being a Harvard biologist, John Bohannon, who sent an invented article full of nonsense on how to combat cancer using lichens to 304 scientific journals. Of this number, 157 accepted it for publication. While these publications were second tier, the problem affects them all, even those of greater importance. " Publish or perish " is the rule and not just from today. However, today, researchers are forced to publish more and more in order to keep ahead of the competition, and to demonstrate by weight of their reputation that they deserve indispensible funding, in short, in order to survive. The bar has been raised therefore, says the " Economist " , causing a collapse in the control mechanisms tied to the reproducibility of the experiments and to those anonymous referees who have the task of judging the articles prior to submission to the journals. This reproducibility, from Galileo onwards, is the cornerstone of the scientific method: the results of an experiment, independently conducted, must always be the same. If the anopheles mosquito really transmits malaria, whoever repeats the experiment will confirm that. However, this becomes an abstract idea when the cost of such projects are measured in millions of euros. Who will take the trouble to spend such an amount only to prove something that we already think we know? The referees, who are supposed to prove the articles, are also scientists, and are also under pressure in their fight for survival where the first victim is the time necessary to work properly. Some of them still try to, some don't, and thus experiments conducted in a haphazard fashion pass quality control unscathed, and statistically inconsistent results end up by being accepted as valid. In part, this depends on the growing number of researchers. Darwin thought for 23 years prior to publishing " The Origin of Species " , but today, with 6 or 7 million scientists in the world, a week's delay can make the difference between success and failure. Speed has become a necessity and …