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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. 

Democracy needs harmony first. Other issues second.

We live in a time of intense division. At least most of us perceive this to be true. Media is smeared with divisive messages, warnings and threats suggesting imminent destruction of society. Why? Because those terrible other groups are destroying it we are told.

Disagreement, discussion and conflict are productive for collective decision-making up to a point. But when emotions and conflicts escalate too far, discussion ends and war begins. Once sides become entrenched, progress comes to a halt and society is at risk of breakdown. The scenario of an internal war breaking out in a rich democratic society might seem far fetched, but keep in mind that it almost happened on Jan. 6th in the United States.

Even if an armed civil war does not happen, there are social, cultural and political wars already raging, especially on social media where the enemy is not seen face-to-face but consumed in the form of media messages and then constructed in our minds. I remember the first time I was accused of being part of a cultural Marxist conspiracy, because I was “woke”. What a wake up call.

Social harmony and integration of different perspectives must be the ultimate


It would be ideal if we could heal racism, sexism and other -isms. We in the behavioral and social sciences know how. This would simply require people across all ages to repeatedly throughout the course of their life to take courses and personal time to reflect deeply on their biases, discuss these biases with others who have same and different biases, and actively listen to others’ struggles with oppressive and prejudiced treatments (including the stories of white people feeling mistreated).

Now as a reader I ask you to briefly set aside your ideas about being “woke” or not, what you think is the correct moral imperative for society, and what you know is true about social injustice in the world. I ask you to instead be “awake” with me for a moment. Do you think a scenario where we all just give up our personal priorities and go into some kind of collective harmonic oppression therapy on a regular basis, where we heal from all forms of trauma and overcome social biases? Its ridiculously unrealistic.

People like me who have pushed for social justice have taken this for granted. Just because this would be an effective method to heal racial and other intersectional prejudices and injustices, does not mean it is possible. The general agenda of movements pushing for diversity, equity and inclusion has proven to be too unrealistic for the society we live in.

Read the statement again:

This would simply require people across all ages to repeatedly throughout the course of their life to take courses and personal time to reflect deeply on their biases, discuss these biases with others who have same and different biases, and actively listen to others’ struggles with oppressive and prejudiced treatments (including the stories of white people feeling mistreated).

This is what it would really take to move past the historical oppressions and traumas that are embedded in modern democratic societies, which were mostly founded on certain land owning men having democratic rights and everyone else beholden to them, with some used for slave labor. In other words, these issues run deep, they are historical, they have collective trauma and they required violence to maintain.

No campaign, no curriculum, and no ideology will ever fully convince most people that they are (a) racist at times and (b) that they need to do something about it. And those that are openly racist, certainly will not be willing to take any actions or support spending public money on it. And if you force them, they are even less willing to learn or change. I’m sorry to say, but most people have other things on their agendas. I wish this were not the case, but that’s reality.

This is a critical juncture. The movements pushing for diversity, equity and inclusion wanted to reduce group-based prejudice and discrimination. Not a bad goal in my opinion. These movements took many steps in that direction that could have helped achieve this goal, but it upset many segments of society. They went too far. There was a backlash.

There are still many people in the U.S. who believe that white families should own black slaves. And although such people are rare, it is likely that a majority of people racialized as white believe that persons with dark skin are genetically inferior. That they are essentially a single race with features that they are born with that make them less reliable and potentially dangerous. White people who think this way – the average white person I would guess whether they admit it or not – are triggered by social justice movements, especially those targeting race or gender identity. Especially if they themselves are struggling to make ends meet, telling them they are “the problem” is certain to piss them off.

I wish these things were not true, but this is reality. Such people are triggered and fueled by media fear-mongering playing up the threat of social justice movements. One outcome of this fear was a monumental swing in votes so that the Presidency, House and Senate all went Republican in 2024; and not just Republican Party but a certain brand of politics that is radically opposed to social justice movements that push for diversity, equity and inclusion. The first order of business was then not surprisingly to remove two decades worth of policies to push for social justice.

I say “critical juncture” , because society should go on. We must live together somehow, despite this reality. I say “must” because any other option would require removing certain groups from society. Trying to remove racist white men from society is just as racist as trying to oppress those with dark skin. We cannot remove racism through voting or arguing. It is a feature of society that nobody controls, it just exists.

Most of what I read online and hear from people is how awful things are. Those opposed to the social justice movements for diversity and inclusion see them as awful, and those who support the movements see those opposed as awful. Hate, hate and more hate. I cannot tell you how many of my close colleagues and friends, many with PhDs, constantly state that anyone that voted for the current U.S. president is disgusting, morally vacuous, and fucked in the head. They claim absolute moral superiority without discussion.

This reaction is so strong, that it appears to me that there is a complete lack of respect for other people, or understanding of why others voted the way they did. There is an unwillingness to discuss politics with such people on equal ground in a manner that respects their right to opine and vote for whomever they want. The groups tend to see the other as sick and/or morally inferior. If this remains or deepens in intensity, I will not be surprised if armed conflicts ensue, or perhaps worse, that we democratically vote ourselves into a dictatorship. Some kind of dystopian Hitler 2.0.


Social harmony and integration of different perspectives must be the ultimate priority in a democracy, and especially right now. The key decision-rule when deciding how to proceed in any policymaking or political discussions has to be to first accept and embrace others’ right to think and say how they feel, and vote for what they want. Otherwise, the only other option is war until one side is defeated and removed.

If we are to co-exist, it has become logically obvious to me that some issues that people deeply care about like abortion, public education, public health care, racism, sexism, transgender issues and more – many with profound moral stakes – have to take a backseat to the stability of the system as a whole. Without a stable system, it no longer matters whether abortion is legal because the end of society and democracy means mob rule. Mob rule is the end of the rule of law, where anything goes and people will become slaves of the most powerful gangs. Governance and democracy is there to prevent mob rule in the first place.

To suggest that the intensity of fighting for certain issues needs to be toned down, or to suggest that they might need to be shifted down the priority list is painful to write for me. I have spent my life deeply concerned about race and social justice. I studied African-American Studies and Sociology in college and Sociology and Political Science in graduate school and my focus has been on social inequality. I had not until recently considered that my ideas for society and policies might be simply impossible. If so, it is absurd and potentially dangerous to push for them.

What to do. I need to work on accepting and integrating the fact that people are racist and I (we) cannot change that much into my plans for what would be ideal policies and behaviors in society.

That does not mean prejudice and discrimination are not important nor morally wrong in my opinion, nor that abortion and other issues should not be discussed in society. It means instead that if pushing these issues too hard reduces social stability and harmony so much that society collapses, then they need to be set aside or at least reduced in intensity in the name of harmony.

Above: remains of a once vast and impressive society, governed by an early form of Democracy. Long laid to waste due to a lack of harmony.


Democracy is not based on agreement. It is also not based on cleansing society of those with opposing viewpoints. It works because people accept that others have different viewpoints, and that it is okay to disagree. It is a system designed to contain conflict, not to eliminate it. That means it only survives when tolerance and harmony are treated as priorities above ideological battles, moral righteousness, and sometimes social justice. We need to admit we disagree but that we are still going to work together despite that.

I personally would prefer to prioritize social justice, but if the cost is the end of democracy, I need to admit that it sometimes is not an option.

Racism exists, religious hatred exists, ridiculous fighting across political parties exists. But no solution to these problems is possible in a society that has collapsed under the weight of its own infighting. There is no justice in war. No equality in tyranny.

Putting harmony first is not a way of ignoring injustice, but as a way of preserving the conditions in which justice, tolerance and knowledge can grow and spread.


While global governance and international cooperation matter, we don’t have global governance that has any real power. The nation-state remains the most powerful unit in our world. It is where laws are made, where rights are protected or denied, where armies are mobilized, and where media and education systems are anchored.

If a country falls into civil war or dictatorship, nothing else matters. That’s why harmony must be cultivated within each country first. Stable nations become better neighbors. They are more predictable, more cooperative, and less aggressive. So harmony within nations becomes a foundation for peace between them.

Here is another case of certain priorities taking a back seat. It would be ideal if humans acted as one species, one society. If there was a system to enforce equal rights across the globe. But this doesn’t exist. And fighting for it in the modern world system is ineffectual and may lead one to be branded a terrorist. Then it is stupid to push for that in the first place. Impossible policy goals are a waste of time and dangerous. This is a reminder that we need to play the hand we were dealt. This is how things are. What can I do today to support harmony and co-existence. Me asking myself that led to this essay. Call it a manifesto for harmony as a solution if you like. Call it anti-woke. Call it selling out. I accept your criticism openly and would like to talk discuss it with you. And would like to do this as equals interested in co-existence.

Open Science? What’s That?

Was the answer I got from Andrew Abbott at a Hogwart’s dinner I was fortunate enough to attend a few years back when I asked him after dinner, “what are your thoughts on open science?”

That’s right. Open science. Say something paradigm changing.

We have so many results and coherent arguments about the status of science. To make an impact here requires synthesizing them into something new. Not purely constructively new in nature, but also subtly undermining all that came before. Something was missing all along and this new perspective is it. That’s the problem.

Our formula for declaring theory and opinion in scientific writing is that it must be big. Paradigm impacting. Makes you think. Expresses the scientist author’s authoritative intellect and ingenious perspective. With seemingly effortless written words, the scientist author lays down an argument so convincing, that it must be true. It was true all along. It is so obvious, why didn’t I see it? Thinks the average reader.

If Diederik Stapel was never caught, he would be a model for success. THE model for success in social psych. You don’t know what the formula for success is? Ask an economist. You have 3, maybe 5 journals in which you need to get published very early on. You have to have a job market paper that is known. You have to have connections. Otherwise you are on the sidelines, building an exit strategy. This is roughly true in the other social and behavioral science disciplines, yet we in sociology or political science will mostly deny it. We are better than those status maniacs.

But it is publish-or-perish. And this is the model.

To do publish, requires word wizardy. The ability to take any findings and craft an argument about them that makes them seem relevant is more valuable than research method skills. To make any findings seem essential to our fundamental understandings of somethings that are important. That is how we do science. Framing.

Andrew Abbott has the goal of out thinking, reading, writing and arguing everyone he encounters. Ask him if you ever meet him. He will not deny this. Easily considered by most to be one of the greatest living sociologists. He was editor of AJS and published book reviews of random, late-night selections in the Oxford library under a pen name, because it was fun. Because that is what legends do, and then tell about. He once wrote that sharing all material to be reproducible and replicable would make science boring.

As long as this is the model for success, we are not making real progress.

I sat at a dinner once with Ronald Inglehart. Every student, postdoc and professor there gawked with wide eyes. What was so appealing and enthralling. Why was this scientist a rock star for us? Was it his findings? Or was it his status? I think status. I think that is what scientists are seeking. I observe it. I feel it. If you have to have certain publications in order to not just pursue a scientific career, but to be at the ‘forefront’ of a subfield, then does it really matter what is in those publications? As long as you get to claim that status, that is it. You win. Why do athletes take steroids, cheat? Is it because of their great passion for the sport? Or is it to win status?

I entered a Master’s program in order to learn about the problems associated with a topic that was pressing for social justice and democracy. I still want to do this. But status was dangled in front of my eyes. ‘Publications are the currency of our trade’. The professor who told me this was absolutely correct. Now I want to do open science, but I have to perform wizardy with words to be recognized as central to the open science movement. This makes me uneasy to the point of nausea.

How can science become trustworthy and effective, if we have to be witty, cutthroat and/or famous in order to take part in it? How can we overcome this delusion? When will we stop and say enough is enough?

This type of honesty is what John Levi Martin specifically advised not to put out on the intrawebs because it will come back to bite me someday. Image (presentation) is everything. Warhol or Abbott, they figured that out long ago. I guess then for my own peace of mind, I extend my hand. Bite away you biters.

Open science in sociology. What, why and now.

WHAT

By now you’ve heard the term “open science”. Although it has no global definition, its advocates tend toward certain agreements. Most definitions focus on the practical aspects of accessibility.

“…the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods.”


FORSTER, open science teaching resource

Some definitions enter the realm of ethics, feminism and social justice.

“…to imagine and design inclusive infrastructures, practices, and workflows for scientific practice that intentionally enable meaningful participation and redress (these new) forms of exclusion.


Denisse Albornoz,OCSDNet

Others focus on the communicative interplay between scientists and the public.

“Openness in Open Science also means opening up science to society… The democratic ideal of Open Science argues for equal two-way communication with the public: one should not solely focus on the question of how to foster the uptake of science in society, but also on how to foster the uptake of societal insights in science.


Anne-Floor Scholvinck,ZBW Mediatalk

Whatever the ontology, open science is inevitably something that challenges the status quo in science. Usage of term indicates there is something undesirable about science, otherwise advocates would simply advocate “science”.

The “open” part of the concept refers to any number of things depending on whom you ask. Commonly it means:

Open access – making the results of scientific techniques, research and theory accessible to everyone; as opposed to only in paywalled journals.

Transparency <open process> – making all methods, code, data and any biases or conflicts of interest known before and after the research is conducted. So long as doing this does not harm human subjects or violate any laws.

Open source – on the technology side of science, all programs, apps, algorithms, tools and scripts should be transparent and usable by others. This means that when a scientist develops a new technology, anyone else’s technologies can interact and interface with it. Moreover, anyone can modify the technology to better suit their own needs.

Open academia <open communication/democracy/feminism> – allowing anyone to participate in academia. That academia has the goal of eliminating inequalities, prejudice and domination from academia that take place in the social world. That academia embraces feminism and critical race theory in its methods and institutional practices. That everyone has the same place in scientific discussions, and no science is conducted by pressuring others or taking advantage of existing power structures. That no science takes place in secret, except for research that requires obfuscation for its completion.

Again, the definitions can cover a broad range. The above are just a snippet, although they strike me as the most common usages; except for ‘open academia’, this is reserved for certain justice motivated scholars.

WHY

Although I do not proclaim to be the arbiter or knower of right or wrong in academia (and life in general), the following facts seem wrong to me.

Double-work and the co-opting of journals

Scientists provide their work as editors and reviewers, because the peer review and publication process is the centerpiece of all of science. Peer reviewers and editors are the only consistent form of quality control in science. The academic journal was a functional response to previous forms of knowledge transmission that required direct scientist/practitioner to student interactions which were geographically limited and reached a very narrow audience.

The journal made it possible to transmit knowledge across the globe. Moreover, the journal reduced the simultaneous discovery and re-discovery problems of science, because no one could prove they discovered something first, and others worked on problems that were already solved unknowingly. It represents one of the first ‘open science’ movements because it was driven by the idea that science was at an impasse and could only move forward through transparent and open exchange of ideas arbitrated by being part of the public record through publishing.

Ironically, the journal format came full circle and began to undermine science. After over two centuries of journals run by non-profit academic associations, for-profit publishing houses began ‘offering’ their services to meet the growing global demand for journals and their content and the rising costs of editing and distribution. In many cases, these publishing houses were able to purchase the journals by offering the academic societies the exclusive right to determine what went in them. Within just 30 years, five conglomerates owned the titles, content or certain features of over 50% of all journal articles published globally.

The content, as always, is still a product of the scientists and the voluntary work of editors and peer reviewers. The publishing houses make large profits, but pay nothing to these workers. The editors and peer reviewers earn their income from universities mostly. The very universities that pay high fees to purchase the right to provide the journals in their libraries. This is a double tax on the universities – paying the producers of content to produce and then paying the distributors of that content to consume it. The content does not change at any point in between these two forms of payment, in other words, the publishers do not add any scientific value to this content.

Matters got even worse with the publishing houses over the past decades. As creative and deceitful profit seekers, some publishing houses realized they could generate even more profit by collaborating with the private sector. For example pharmaceutical companies’ profits were directly determined by the findings of studies published in journals. Pharmaceutical companies, or any companies whose profits were determined by the outcomes of scientific experiments, would be willing to invest in shaping those outcomes if they could. Enter a novel concept pioneered by Elsevier: selling journals or journal space to private companies to boost their profits. Win-win for them. Elsevier also pioneered the process of monetizing open science by purchasing SSRN, engaging in massive lawsuits designed to stop the free sharing of (their) copyrighted knowledge and tries to copyright intellectual activities such as peer review.

Other ventures create journals that prey on scholars who do not know better, or seek to get easy publications to add to their CV. These publishers are often labeled “predatory publishers” and they “publish work without proper peer review and which charge scholars sometimes huge fees to submit should not be allowed to share space with legitimate journals and publishers, whether open access or not” (predatoryjournals.com). They also sometimes mimic reputable journals by copying their styles and their names and soliciting content from scholars, a procedure known as “hijacking“.

Publish-or-perish begets questionable research practices

Thanks to the advent of the scientific journal, knowledge could be evaluated, used and further transmitted across space and time. The utility of the journal and other forms of academic publication such as books, proved so effective that they became the primary source for others to evaluate the importance of scientists and their work. This gave rise to the norm we are all familiar with, publish-or-perish.

In a survey of psychologists, John et al. (2012) found that 50% claimed they had selectively reported studies that supported their hypothesis (as in, selectively excluding those that didn’t). Moreover, 35% admitted to reporting unexpected findings as having been predicted from the start. Nearly 2% outright admitted to faking data.

Publish-or-perish and questionable research practices have a causal relationship. Except for occasional sociopathic or psychotic individuals, there is no reason for a scientist to engage in questionable research practices. No reason, except scientists’ very existence on scientists may depend on it. So many studies in reality lead to results that go in all directions, support the null or (most importantly) do not provide groundbreaking new results.

Through the peer review and editorial process, journals select studies that are path-breaking. Studies that will move knowledge forward and be of the greatest interest to readers. When faced with prospects of not getting tenured, not getting grant funding and being forced out of academia, a human’s (scientist’s) rational calculations change. Suddenly, rounding that p-value from 0.054 to < 0.05 or even adding some cases to the data becomes a cognitively defensible decision.

Like any profession, science is competitive. Those who publish more, or get more citations to their publications tend to get ahead. Those who don’t, don’t. Professional athletes use incredible tactics to gain competitive advantage. Of course steroids are well-known, but other tactics are much harder to detect. For example, endurance athletes often use blood transfusions to boost recovery and performance. This is what it means to be human, scientist or not.

One of the most radical events in the social and behavioral sciences is Diederik Stapel’s entire career faking data and results that were published in at least 54 articles that consumed millions of Euro in funding. It took almost two decades for critics and whistleblowers to finally out him. Psychology is not alone. In political science LaCour and Green published a study in Science that attitudes toward gay marriage could be changed if heterosexual people listened to a homosexual person’s story, but it turns out LaCour fabricated results of a follow up survey that never took place as uncovered by Broockman. In economics Reinhart and Rogoff published numerous studies identifying a negative impact of high debt rates on national economic growth, when in fact several points in their dataset had conspicuously missing values. When these values were added there was no longer support for their claim as identified by Herndon, Ash and Pollin.

I suspect that most questionable research practices are not intentional. The sociopathic (~psychotic) Stapel’s of the world are rare. This pressure to find a job after doing doctoral studies and then to get tenured, means a trade off between conducting science in its ideal form – so learning as much as possible about the existing literature on a subject, mastering the necessary methods to perform the research and executing the research, possibly with several iterations, and facing the prospect of null results – with science in a form that will lead to publication as fast as possible.

This ‘fast as possible’ leads to amateur science. For example, in the rush to get my first publication I attempted to use “multiple imputation”, but lacked the time to properly learn this method. Instead I simply generated several datasets and averaged them into one and re-ran the analysis on this one. This was not an intentional misuse of a method. It is a questionable research practice as a result of context. Think about matrix algebra. It is the basis of many advanced statistical techniques regularly used by social scientists. How many of us have a strong grasp of matrix mathematics? I don’t. And yet I’ve published several studies using structural equation modeling.

WHAT & WHY in SOCIOLOGY

I am aware of nothing about sociology that suggests it needs a special adaptation of open science. Most research cannot be strictly delineated as sociology or not sociology anyways. The boundaries of a discipline, especially within the social sciences, exist mostly in the institutional structure of universities. Eliason suggested that sociology is unique because it overemphasizes quantitative techniques, has needlessly long articles, lacks writing for the popular press and emphasizes research at the expense of teaching. In my experience the previous sentence perfectly describes all social and behavioral science disciplines at once. Even article length, something I thought might be peculiar to sociology, is not special. Political science and management research have very long articles. Consider that and ASR and ESR for example, limit words to 9,000 and 8,000 or less – this is relatively average if not short for social science.

Actually, I would argue the most unique thing about sociology at the moment relates to open science. Two points in particular: (A) that sociology has not had the same incredible scandals as other disciplines and (B) that sociology lags behind other social sciences in promoting open science.

A lack of scandals, not scandalousness

Could sociologists be more scientific and ethical in their research behaviors than those in other disciplines? Given identical institutional and career structures that favor productivity and innovation over replicating or checking each other’s work, I doubt it. Sociology journals and their editors, for example, rarely retract articles despite evidence of serious methodological mistakes. Carina Mood once accurately pointed out mistakes in the interpretation of odds-ratios in some American Sociological Review articles, but the editors refused to publish her comments, much less consider retractions. She shared her exchange with ASR in an email to me and discusses some of it in a working paper. An exceptional recent event was the retraction of one of Legewie’s sociological studies, but this required he himself to initiate the retraction after someone pointed out errors in his work. Until 2020, the Retraction Watch database (www.retractiondatabase.org) listed no retractions from the top sociology journals, and only two among the well-known, one in Sociology and another in Social Indicators Research.

This year, something new happened. Five articles published in Social Problems, Criminology, and Law & Society Review were retracted. These articles had the common co-author Eric Stewart. It turns out that the data he provided were faked. There is no other logical conclusion that this after exceptionally rigorous work by Pickett (a co-author of Stewart) provided evidence that the Stewart studies had consistently incorrect means and standard deviations, unverifiable surveys (sources, methods, original materials), magically changing case numbers despite identical statistical results, sometimes half the data had duplicate cases and impossible clustering structures in the data.

As an aside, one of Pickett’s findings was that the data had non-uniform terminal digit distributions. This means that the right-most digits in the reported statistics differs markedly from a uniform distribution. In particular, at the third-digit numbers should be uniformly distributed with 0-9 appearing roughly 10% of the time. In one of the papers, zeros appear less than 2% of the time. If you are considering faking data, keep in mind that it is roughly impossible to do it in a way that cannot be detected by careful investigation. Any algorithm used to generate results (even copying and pasting) leaves is statistical marks.

Perhaps we sociologists should be partly relieved, as this is just confirmation that we are as much a part of social science and its problems, as any other discipline. However, the Stewart retractions which should have been breaking news for sociology, went mostly unnoticed. The results of the investigation leading to the retractions is not published in a flagship sociology journal where it belongs. Instead it appears in Econ Journal Watch – something unlikely to be read by any sociologist. Moreover, the retraction notices from the original journals do not cite outright fraud. Stewart continues to promote his work in print claiming the main findings still hold, and several other of his studies with similar irregularities have not been retracted.

Another, extremely important event was a case of ethnomethodological research conducted by Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose in the mid 2010s. This is sociological self-examination at its best, although their backgrounds are mostly outside of the discipline of sociology. They wrote a series of 20 papers presenting fake results and making arguably unethical claims. They invented the papers to mimic the style of articles published in journals well-known for sociological research on topics of identity, hegemony and marginalization. Seven of their papers were published or had revise and resubmit recommendations before whistleblowing forced them to cancel the project. Some highlights: one paper contained sections from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Another suggested men should be trained similar to dogs to prevent rape, and a third that white men should be forced to sit in chains on the floors of university classrooms, instead of normal desks. I am not commenting on the merit contained in these ideas, only that they all contained faked data, non-existent methods or conclusions not supported by the data. That these studies easily flew under the radar of a number of high impact journals points out how easy it is to publish without doing the necessary research work.

Lagging behind closed doors

October 6th, 2020. I entered the search terms “open science” (with quotations to search the exact phrase) and “sociology” (with quotations to only return results that contain the word) into Google Scholar. Six pages of results without a single sociology journal. On page 7, Merton’s “Priorities in scientific discovery: a chapter in the sociology of science” appears. Publication date 1957.

In 1973, Wilson, Smoke and Martin found that 80% of studies published in the top three sociology journals of that time rejected the null hypothesis, in other words they had p-values below a threshold. This suggests publication bias, if not p-hacking. Sahner (Table 5) analyzed all article submissions to the Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 1972-1980. Of those that contained significance tests, 70% were significant at p < 0.05 suggesting that authors prefer to submit significant results. More recently, Gerber and Malhotra (2008) reviewed articles published in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review and The Sociological Quarterly, and specifically looked at the boundary of t = 1,96 (i.e., p<0.05) to find that as many as 4-out-of-5 studies were ‘significant’. This suggests publication bias as well. Sociology has yet to have a systematic review of p-hacking by comparing p-values within ‘significant’ results. Meanwhile psychology and political science for example are teeming with papers on “p-hacking” and “publication bias”.

Sociology is rather intransparent. An estimated 78% of the major sociology journals have long-standing transparency policies. Unfortunately, these policies are mostly artifacts on paper without much enforcement. For example, only 37% of sociology articles published in the mainstream journals between 2012-2014 include shared data and/or materials. In 2015, a small group of sociologists tried to obtain materials from the authors of 53 prominent sociological studies. They obtained these from just 19%, and only 20% of all the authors they contacted bothered to respond despite several requests. This suggests sociologists are free to hide the data and materials that led to their findings without recourse, despite such guidelines.

Other disciplines have embraced the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (TOP). The TOP guidelines with help of the Center for Open Science support journals to improve science. Journals can become signatories of TOP, and in doing so they either adopt and enforce new transparency guidelines, or certify that they already meet certain transparency standards. Most of the top psychology journals and several political science journals signed on. Other major journals such as the Journal of Applied Econometrics and later the American Economic Review adopted their own enforced transparency guidelines.

Until 2017, the only higher ranking sociology journals that signed TOP were Sociological Methods and Research and American Journal of Cultural Sociology. In 2017, Elsevier dictated that all its journals adopt guidelines and this added Social Science Research to the list. At the time of writing this, the flagship journals American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review neither signed TOP nor enforce their own guidelines. Of top German sociology journals, the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie is the only signatory.

If intransparency is pervasive in sociology, then research cannot be (a) checked for errors, (b) reproduced or (c) simply critiqued. Even when exact reproducibility is not the goal, as often is the case with context-specific interpretive research, most research methods remain shrouded in mystery. This requires readers to take a giant leap to trust what others report. Part of the problem is that sociologists express little interest in reproduction or checking others’ works. There are few replications in the history of sociology, and if anything, they decreased over time until recently. For example, searching the articles in American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review reveals 22 replication studies from 1950-1980 and only 8 from 1981-2010.

Something telling about a lack of willingness to open sociology comes from sociology’s most ‘powerful’ society, the American Sociological Association. They collectively petitioned the US government to not make data transparency a requirement attached to grant funding in 2019.

NOW

What to do about it? Here are some simple steps to consider especially for sociologists. Similar to steps advocated by many others for graduate students and academic institutions, or all of us for example.

Transparency

Make all the materials – research design, methodological steps, data (when legally and ethically possible), analyses, conflict of interest and any software code – available online. The practical reason is that others can follow your work and expand it in the future. Doubly practical is that you don’t need to respond to email requests for your materials. So long as you are not a deceitful sociopath, you want others interested in your work and to replicate your work. Even if a study, seems to ‘prove you wrong’, the fact that it replicated your work is evidence of how important your work is and the topic of study. You are a piece of a much larger community of knowledge construction. Constructive exchange can lead to collaboration with critics to generate better future research without personal conflicts.

The immediate value of transparency is that being transparent forces you to be careful. Knowing everything will be public information increases the value of attention to detail. Put in its converse: not sharing your workflow publicly can indirectly foster lower quality standards, in addition to creating possibilities for misconduct. All this enables rather than hinders knowledge, and increases inter-researcher trust.

Transparency should not be much extra work. During the research process you should take high quality notes for yourself. You will often return to your data and research in the future and thus need those notes. This is a best practice with or without sharing your work. When you engage in this best practice, you have a deep familiarity with your data and can draw meaningful conclusions and easily redact identifying characteristics in your data in the case of qualitative research. In case you cannot share data, you can still reveal the design and expectations; or allow controlled access to the data. Human subjects must be protected at all costs, and yes this often means data sharing is not possible .

The ‘transparency work’ of the qualitative research process can be reduced by software platforms that provide semi-automated annotation and coding. Even if you do not share data, you can build an open workflow from the beginning that allows others to understand every step of the data generating process. However, this work can also be extremely tedious and the incentives not immediately clear. More fruitful discussion if not research assistant funding is needed in this area moving forward.

If you are using quantitative methods, immediately stop hiding your work. If you ran 100 models and 99 did not support your hypothesis, then this is your finding. If a journal does not want to publish this, point the editors and reviewers to the importance of null results and the problems of publication bias. If they still refuse, consider boycotting this journal and sharing your negative experience in public.

Preregistration

Preregistration can drastically reduce bias and hacking prior to collecting data. When you clearly outline your plans including how you will analyze the data, before conducting the research, there is little room for hacking so long as you stick to the plan. Moreover, preregistration can be done directly with a journal although sociology journals are laggards here because they generally do not offer this option. In a preregistration, even if you just put an pre-analysis plan or research design and goals online, you must think much harder about factors such as meaning, causality, inter-subjectivity and ‘how the world probably works’. You cannot hide behind results in this process and therefore you must anticipate counterarguments and explore counterfactual logic. This improves the clarity of theory and research, creating an immense gain in efficiency and effectiveness.

Regardless of the methods you use there are many opportunities to take advantage of preregistration. Some forms of qualitative research, for example those involving grounded theory and interpretivist methods, require decisions during the research process that cannot be foreseen. This uncertainty can be outlined in a preregistration stating explicitly when flexibility is and is not admissible. Moreover, simply putting a qualitative research plan online prior to conducting the research is equivalent to a pre-analysis plan. This research design need not compromise your data collection work because you can register the plan on a platform like the Open Science Framework and then embargo it, so that it is preserved but not made public until after the research concludes. Some scholars using quantitative methods might assume that preregistration is not possible because they work with secondary survey data. But the regularity and release of these survey data are known in advance, and these scholars can preregister their studies before the next round of data are collected with the knowledge of which questions and countries will be available.

Decommodify science

The central functions of the scientific publishing industry are printing and disseminating knowledge, which historically solved a problem of how to share knowledge across universities and countries. The business functions of publishing, however, come with harmful byproducts. Publishing firms extract profits from scientists twice. First, scientists provide free labor in the form of editing and peer reviewing, in addition to producing the results for the articles to be printed. Next, researchers, or their employers, must purchase the product of their own labor; labor not paid for by the publishers. The journal article as a product comes at a high cost, and often only in packages of journals meaning that universities have to pay for extra material their scholars do not use.

Sometimes publishing houses neglect science in favor of profits, but Elsevier has been particularly problematic. They sponsored weapon fairs, created and sold ‘fake’ journals to pharmaceutical companies to publish ‘results’ supporting their drugs, purchased the Social Science Research Network and created paywalls or removed legally shared working versions of articles, charge fees for open access articles, and actively lobbied against open access legislation (For a concise summary with links see Tal Yarkoni’s blog entry). This brought massive counter movements against Elsevier in the scientific community (for example, The Cost of Knowledge). You can take action and refuse to review for or publish with unethical publishers if you feel it is justified. Thus, you should inform yourself about the publishers. Your libraries are a source of information, because they deal with the business side of publishers.

If you are in Europe, check if your institution is a signatory of ProjektDEAL. A consortium of universities are collectively bargaining with publishers via ProjektDEAL demanding that publishers reduce fees and eliminate the double paying of universities. The primary objective is that publishers sign country-wide subscription agreements that enable access for all universities at once. Wiley agreed to such a model and this marks a paradigm change. It indicates how the publishing industry looks in the future, so long as the OS Movement proceeds. If you are not in Europe, consider starting a similar initiative, for example the entire University of California system of 10 universities, 5 medical centers and several research institutions that collectively produce roughly 10% of the world’s academic publications recently followed ProjektDEAL and boycotted Elsevier.

You can work around the publishing business. Prior to submitting an article or after it is published, you have the right to share a preprint – a draft of the paper you share publicly so long as it is not published elsewhere or sold for profit. Posting preprints reduces the power that publishing firms have over science, in addition to giving others immediate access to your work. But simply posting preprints on your academic website is not open enough. Use a preprint service, for example through the Open Science Framework, to ensure that your preprints appear in search engines such as Google Scholar. SocArXiv for example, is the go to location for sociology. This enables scholars to find and directly access research results based on the words they contain, uninhibited by paywalls – a crucial aspect to practicing sociology in the Global South. Preprint services are free and open access.