The Shaky Foundation of Scientific Research

An alert is raised: a pillar of scientific research is trembling, cracking, and even threatening to collapse. This pillar is the research article, selected and evaluated by scientific journals. It’s through this medium that Albert Einstein explained his theory of special relativity in 1905 (in the Annalen der Physik). Or that Alexander Fleming, in 1929, described the action of penicillin (in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology). Or even that James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA in 1953 (in the journal Nature).

What is being questioned is not the article itself, although it is also transforming, but the place it occupies in the scholarly landscape, the way it is distributed, evaluated, or “consumed.” The research article has indeed changed its nature. “It is no longer a unit of knowledge, but has become a unit of evaluation,” recalled Philippe Huneman, a researcher at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the CNRS, during the Agora sciences université recherche. Reunited on June 16 and 17 in Paris to “re-found the university and research,” it devoted a session to this subject. “It is a machine for transforming knowledge into symbolic and financial gains. The article is therefore at the heart of the research system and the source of many problems,” he specified.

It is no longer only, as it has long been, the culmination of a work: it has become both the raison d’être of this activity, the way to measure its productivity, the standard that distinguishes good researchers from less good ones, the key that makes careers. And, in recent years, this centrality causes unfortunate excesses. Too many articles, too expensive and of too poor quality, are circulating… And the arrival of artificial intelligence only amplifies these flaws.

---

Enjoyed this post by Thibault Helle? Subscribe for more insights and updates straight from the source.