Discussions and narratives from four behavioral and social scientists about their experiences learning, observing, and doing things in the course of research, and communicating that research, that confound, and even contradict, the goals of science.
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:
“[When I started graduate school, science to me at first meant that] “the quality of knowledge produced is … the real value in science and what will be rewarded. [but] That got replaced with this publish thing … How do you know it’s good science? It’s a good publication”
“[Publishing papers is] serving God and the Devil. And researchers are in a position where this is what they’re supposed to do to pay the rent, to advance their careers and eat and all of those things. And the way the system is set up, it’s actually at cross purposes with creating reliable knowledge. Because if you try to do that [create reliable knowledge], well, you’re f#$!ed. Your career doesn’t advance.”
“Junior scholars who start out as idealists in most cases, I think, people who want to do science in the sense of finding about finding truth or understanding the world better, in the process of being socialized into the system [they] learn about publishing. The fetishism of long CVs and long publication lists. So they internalize this and learn … to understand science [as] an activity that’s… That resembles sports competition in which the goal is to … succeed and out outmaneuver your opponents who also sort of compete for those scarce resources, especially permanent positions.”
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:
“That was my experience just being, being completely shocked when [my supervisor] told me, well, you know, just come up with a story to explain the data. And I’m like but, I have questions and these data go in a different way than this question. ‘Yeah, but otherwise you can’t get published. You have to tell a story.’ And this was just so jarring to me.”
“What comes to mind is the first time that I ever presented a poster… I was being encouraged to basically just think about all the analyses I’d done for my project and pick out the ones that told the best story, make sure that the poster told a really clear story, and it was explicit that it didn’t matter if this wasn’t everything. In fact, that’s normal. That’s why we do so many different things, is so that we can then pick out the ones that make the nice story. And it sounded kind of nice to me. I liked the idea because it, it was like a fun, creative exercise that I thought was part of science.”
“We would really just like put these variables in and adjust them, and certain variables might be highly correlated. I don’t know, let’s say like education and occupation. And so we, you know, we’d probably drop one [because of multicollinearity] if it wasn’t too important to our story. And which one would we drop? We would drop the one that had the least impact. You know, we would drop the one that would keep the X-Y relationship as strong as possible. And every decision was pretty much like that.”
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.
“The way things are supposed to work. Right. Who am I to, to question that as a Ph.D. student?”
“I think that those who are humble, those who are keenly aware of their own limitations, the limitations of the work that not only they, but all of all scientists do, may not be the ones who have the highest chance of succeeding in this system.”
“I’d been told to my face that the only reason I was there, that the only reason I got an NRSA, the only reason I gotten a Sage fellowship was because I was a [minority]. I was told this to my face. All of my accomplishments meant nothing. The fact that I brought original ideas and raised important questions, none of that mattered. The only reason I’d gotten in was, according to these people, and these were my peers, other graduate students. This is what they said to my face and what they said behind my back. So it was an absolutely toxic environment.”
“So if it’s not a safe space within academia, we can’t expect the people in academia to behave well. Right. So people are… They’re not safe, they’re feeling unsafe. This creates conflict, fears, anxieties, and then there’s many different ways to deal with that. But I think some of those could be… questionable research practices.”
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.
