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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. 

The ISA should not ban scientific associations for failing to take political stances.

On June 29th, 2025, just one week before its World Forum in Rabat, Morocco, the International Sociological Association (ISA) leadership banned the Israeli Sociological Society (ISS).

The reason is that the ISS did not take “a clear position condemning the dramatic situation in Gaza.” In other words, that they are not taking a position in direct opposition to and protest of their own government. Although there are reasons that some would want to take such a position, in particular the incredible humanitarian crisis in Gaza, it is not fair to punish a scientific organization for not taking this position. In other words, not fair to try and force a scientific organization to mix itself in with politics. I can think of three concrete reasons.

  1. Science itself should prioritize inquiry, not political action. We conduct research and develop theories, that is science. Sociology is the science of society and social interaction. Therefore, sociologists should (continue to) engage with the war and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. They should try to present facts to answer the questions: What is happening there? Who is affected? Are the actions of the Israeli military in violation of the Geneva Convention? Is this a genocide? To blackmail other scientists to force them to take political action or face consequences to their participation in science and scientific exchange, runs counter to prioritization of inquiry in science.
  2. Scientists taking political positions could be in danger. In particular in authoritarian, or martial law settings, scientists who stand up against their government put not only their scientific enterprise at risk, but also their lives and their families’ lives potentially at risk. The ISA is demanding that members of the ISS take actions that could lead to their Society facing funding cuts or being cancelled altogether. Even worse, the ISA is demanding that Israeli sociologists take a position counter to their government in the middle of one of a radically politically charged historical moments – it is asking them to potentially put their lives as risk.
  3. Where do we draw the lines of where to take political action? If a humanitarian crisis and what appears to some scholars as a genocide are conditions for taking political action on part of the ISA, where do we draw the line? Why does the ISA not ban all Myanmar sociologists from participating because of the situation of the Rohingya? Perhaps even more perplexing are the odd exceptions: The ISS is banned, but what if an Israeli sociologist is not a member, can they participate? Perhaps someone forgot to pay their membership dues this year but was a member before. Can they participate? What about the United States and Germany? These are the greatest allies of Israel, why are they not banned? What about Russia invading Ukraine? These questions are rhetorical, because this is a Pandora’s box that is infinite and quickly digresses into everyone getting banned.

In fairness, there is a humanitarian disaster going on in Gaza. It is tragic for all the innocent bystanders swept up in it. Those who have been kidnapped, killed, harmed by bombing. Its awful to watch. But I am not writing this in regards to any political movement or government. I am writing this to defend science, which I see as my responsibility.