Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability, Brembs 2018

Indigophoton · Feb 21, 2018

A review article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, "the 1st most cited journal in psychology",

In which journal a scientist publishes is considered one of the most crucial factors determining their career. The underlying common assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals. However, data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal. On the contrary, an accumulating body of evidence suggests the inverse: methodological quality and, consequently, reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank.
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Conclusion
There are currently several lines of evidence in the literature, suggesting that highly prestigious journals fail to reach a particularly high level of reliability. On the contrary, some of the data seem to indicate that, on average, the highest ranking journals often struggle to raise above the average reliability levels set by the other journals.
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In particular, comparing higher with lower ranked journals, two main conclusions can be drawn: (1) experiments reported in high-ranking journals are no more methodologically sound than those published in other journals; and (2) experiments reported in high-ranking journals are often less methodologically sound than those published in other journals.

Interestingly, not a single study provides evidence for the third option of higher-ranking journals publishing the most sound experiments. It is this third option that one would expect at least one area of inquiry to have conclusively demonstrated, if there was a true positive association between journal rank and reliability.
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Thus, the most conservative interpretation of the available data is that the reliability of scientific results does not depend on the venue where the results was published. In other words, the prestige, which allows high ranking journals to select from a large pool of submitted manuscripts, does not provide these journals with an advantage in terms of reliability.
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This body of evidence complements evolutionary models suggesting that using productivity as selection pressure in hiring, promotion and funding decisions leads to an increased frequency of questionable research practices and false positive results (Higginson and Munafò, 2016; Smaldino and McElreath, 2016). Arguably, scientists who become “successful” scientists by increasing their productivity through reduced sample sizes (i.e., as a consequence, reduced statistical power) and by publishing in journals with a track record of unreliable science, will go on teaching their students how to become successful scientists. Already after only one generation of such selection pressures, we begin to see the effects on the reliability of the scientific literature.
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Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability, Brembs 2018

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Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability, Brembs 2018

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