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Questionable research practices from the practitioners’ perspectives

With Monica Gonzales-Marquez, Priya Silverstein and Eike Mark Rinke.

In preparation for Metascience 2025, I put together a panel with three other researchers called “Questionable Research Practices from the Perspective of the Researcher: Understanding Perverse Incentives using Autoethnography”. We used our own discussions in online meetings and individually as recorded narratives as content for this panel. The impetus was that much metascience points accusatory fingers at problems in science, thus supporting a culture of fear. Researchers comply to avoid scrutiny, and not necessarily out of an intrinsic motivation to do good science.

When successful and meaningful science is measured entirely by publication in a ‘high impact’ journal and high citation counts, the drive to do science is transmuted into a laser-like focus on publishing. The intrinsic motivation to contribute to the creation of scientific knowledge becomes confounded with publishing, while simultaneously deprioritising the robust, pedantic, methodical, humble labor involved in doing good research. The scientific method gets confounded with the mechanics of publishing and achieving “standing” in the scientific community.

We hope that by revealing our own experiences in the world of ‘publish-or-perish’, and how it has pushed us towards questionable research practices (QRPs), we might generate intrinsic motivation in others to dispassionately examine their own scientific practices.. By looking back through our histories in academic work and sharing them, we also expect to increase our own intrinsic motivations to be ever vigilant, and to learn to always privilege scientific integrity over publishing.

Confounding: Publication = Science

A major theme in our narratives is that science has been fully confounded with publishing. For some of us, the pressure to publish, and the toxic atmosphere and interactions pushed us out of academia entirely. For others, we internalized the publishing norm, convincing ourselves that we were doing impactful science, when we were actually just doing impactful publishing – which does almost nothing to alter collective human knowledge, promote social justice or solve other societal problems.

Some excerpts from our narratives:

Questionable Behaviors: Hacking

The pragmatics of doing science in a publish or perish culture is that we either engage in some (often undeliberate) hacking and storytelling, or are sanctioned.

Some excerpts:

Ego, Power and Personal Struggles

As human beings we are prone to seeking status, material security, community acknowledgement and different things depending on where we are at in life, and who we are personality-wise. Especially when in graduate school, we are in a position of little power in comparison to professors and our supervisors. People who  wield power over others, and push their own ego-centric agendas tend to be quite successful in science. This can lead to abuses of power, ego trips and other toxic behaviors that can diminish junior researchers’ ability to push back against pressures to engage in QRPs and have strongly demotivating effects.

Intrinsic Motivation

We hope that by speaking out, and normalizing scrutiny of our own experiences of questionable research practices as something valuable, we can help others become intrinsically motivated to do the same. Moreover, we propose that ethnographic narrative may be an underexplored but powerful method to help uncover the causes and motivations of questionable research practices from researchers’ lived experience of “doing science”.

Part of the motivation for this panel is based on one of the authors’ (Nate Breznau’s) own authoethnographic research into my QRPs. He presented preliminary results at the Sociological Science Conference at Cornell (link to slides).

Readers can find the full poster for our presentation at Metascience 2025 at University College London here.

Our future plans are to seek a larger sample of researchers and invite them to a semi-structured narrative sharing process (via recording themselves) to further study QRPs. In particular we hope to target early career researchers to shed light on the current state of science training and supervision experiences. 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nate Breznau (July 24, 2025). Questionable research practices from the practitioners’ perspectives. Crowdid. Retrieved February 9, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14f3u


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