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Can we make physiological research better?

2017; Wiley; Volume: 221; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/apha.12987

1748-1716

Pontus B. Persson, Anja Bondke Persson,

Mitochondrial Function and Pathology

Let us assume that scientists, being on average smart individuals, come with an intrinsic drive to, constantly and based on analytical results, improve the quality of their work and their professional environment. So how can we make science in general and physiological research in particular, better? Answering that question is more than a hypothetical pastime from some ivory tower. Factors as diverse as wrong career incentives in academia, the business model of the publishing industry or scientists' and institutions' chase for public recognition aka social media shares have, among numerous others, been blamed recently in public for phenomena such as published findings that do not replicate, tendencies towards methods that boost or overestimate effect sizes or the often more prominent cases of severe malicious fraud.1-3 The urge to find out how our world works has probably characterized humanity since its humble beginnings. During the course of history, times in which scientist were held in high esteem have come and gone, as have dark ages, witch hunts and blind dogmatic servitude. One may assume that whenever during human development new, interesting discoveries were made, researchers would have been eager to document what they found, either to share their newly found knowledge, to use it to their advantage or both. Doing research has, as may be assumed, always been associated with documenting and releasing information to target audiences. The concept, however, of doing research with a primary objective on obtaining publishable results is a novel phenomenon and one of the major public accusations towards the current system of academic research. Science-specific career incentives tend to be among the most blamed factors for “publication-oriented research” or the generation of “minimal publishable units.” Junior scientists at any career-related checkpoints are often judged by their senior peers, who, in the absence of any better metric, use “the number of publications one has in peer-reviewed journals, as well as the status of those journals (along with related metrics such as the h-index, which purports to measure the rate at which a researcher's work is cited by others)”.1 In the public discussion, it is often argued that these incentives shape the culture of how science is done in the first place, without any active intention let alone malintent of the individual researcher: “[A]s long as institutional incentives reward positive, novel results at the expense of rigor, the rate of bad science, on average, will increase”.1 This led us to look at other professionals and their career incentives. Is it a science-specific problem? Recently, I heard a wise man encourage all scientists to have a look at other professional cultures and learn from each other—lest history has taught us that cultural encounters “may bring the Balkans – or Silicon Valley”.4 Interestingly, career incentives for young artists are not that different after all. Publication formats differ, while professorship is, for many fledgling careers in art, the ultimate goal. The competitive publication business that has developed around art is a different one, and yet not as heavily and openly criticized in the public media. “Every discipline is coloured by what lies beyond argument – desire, belief, imagination” 5—not only is biomedical science publicly funded to a large degree, but it impacts health care, and thus often directly the hopes and fears for oneself or a loved one, and is thus, in the public image, especially susceptible to negative headlines. Have a coffee talk with junior researchers, and ask them what they think makes a project idea fundable and publishable and thus, ultimately, gets them closer to the merits and tenured position they have their eyes on. I did, and the suggestions that came up were mostly not in the line of being especially innovative, talented or diligent—go for the scourges of humanity for most impact or at least say so in your introduction, make the project fit to the funding incentives, use popular catch phrases such as “ageing,” “gender” or “translational impact,” be visible in public through, for example the social media and make altmetrics work in your favour. (Do the latter provide a good alternative?—we have had a closer look at that question.6) We can do better than that, but how? For our recently most read articles, we see a similar distribution of topics: general phenomena such as stress 23 or thermoregulation,24 skeletal muscle regeneration, 25 side by side with highly specific topics such as dopamine function in a subset of immune cells 26 or the mechanism of Sydenham chorea.27 The multitude of topics represented in high-quality publications in Acta Physiologica is a reason to make us proud. To some extent, this also reflects both the relevance of solid physiological research and the applicability of insights from physiology to a multitude of currently relevant biomedical topics. While excellent science is the one factor that determines a successful project, it helps to (i) tell a story with impact and (ii) understand the process from manuscript submission to acceptance for publication. This will help especially junior researchers, and among those especially young colleagues from emerging economies, to not fall victim to predatory journals.28 Avoid erroneous citations: a recent analysis from biology has shown that almost 50% of authors have not actually read their cited sources.29 As scientists, we should be able to do better than that, don't you think? Report honestly and thoroughly, write readably and, if applicable, ask for a second look from a native speaker. Recently, Pontus Plavén-Sigray and his co-workers had a close look at 709,577 abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 from 123 scientific journals. In this text, readability decreased steadily over time, while the use of general scientific jargon increased continuously.30 As the authors point out, clarity and accuracy of reporting are fundamental to the scientific process 30 and should not be separated from data acquisition and analysis. Reputable scientific journals will characteristically give their contributors guidelines to help along the way of assembling an excellent manuscript. Acta Physiologica, in addition to that and together with a long list of reputable biomedical journals, adheres to the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).31 At Acta Physiologica, author support is a major issue, which is in line with Acta's free-to-publish policy. The last issue of the year is, in our opinion, the appropriate place to thank all contributors, authors, reviewers and editors for their invaluable contributions to Acta Physiologica. You are what makes Acta possible. Come forward and tell us what you think, and we will listen. Thank you, everyone. The authors wish to thank Kine Lillestrøm for insightful discussions of the reward systems in the arts as compared to those in the sciences. The authors declare no conflict of interest.