By contrast, if we obsess over quick-hit papers, top journals, impact factors, and citation counts, our students likewise will develop a fixation with incremental science. Similarly, if we keep telling our students that the reason science has become stagnant is that most of the good ideas have been exhausted already, our students will not dare to pursue the kind of exploration that might lead them to uncover important secrets.
We should tell our students that they should strive to uncover something that is deeply unpopular at first and that finding such important secrets is still possible. Of course, not everyone will succeed in finding those secrets, but that should be the goal.
Beyond our proposal, which involves measuring and rewarding novelty, and which in part aims to encourage more adventurous people to become scientists once again, another potential approach for attracting more risk-takers to science involves providing scientists attractive careers that do not involve tenure. For example, we should experiment with contracts that offer more salary, generous research funding, and longer, 15-year, contracts but no tenure.
How can higher education honor and encourage what you call "fruitful scientific failure?"
One concrete thing we can and should do is to educate scientists, students, and analysts more about the natural history of ideas — how ideas develop from the germ of an idea to transformative ideas. We should always keep in mind the skepticism that many great discoveries faced initially, and even for decades, before — after relentless revision, testing, and validation — the ideas finally won the battle. Similarly, we should keep in mind all the apparent failures that these breakthroughs were built upon, and how these apparent failures were the result of exploring the unknown. If we were more cognizant of how science progresses, we would be less tempted to pursue incremental work over risky exploration.
A better understanding of the natural history of ideas would also make peer review more tolerant of new ideas.
Today peer review is often vilified, but I think peer review can serve a useful purpose. The problem today is not with peer review per se but with the fact that scientists have come to see the value of scientific contributions and scientists only through the lens of citations.
If scientists had a better understanding of what citations measure and how ideas develop — in particular, how crucial risky exploration is for scientific progress — I think reviewers would be much more tolerant of exploration. They would then be much more likely to give a green light to exploratory papers than they currently do. Simply asking peer reviewers to rate papers or research proposals in terms of their innovativeness, as the NIH currently does, does not accomplish anything useful when reviewers do not understand how crucial innovativeness and exploration are to how ideas develop and how science progresses.
How else could we reward edge science outside of publishing metrics?
In addition to refocusing existing journals to publish more exploratory work, or starting new journals that would publish exploratory work, we could have prizes that celebrate exploration. Some prizes could reward exploration done in recent years, other prizes could reward exploration that was done in the more distant past but only recently proved to be useful in any way. Certainly, every year after the Nobel-prizes are announced, we should carefully examine what concurrent and prior exploration were underpinning those discoveries. If we gave prizes also for such visibly fruitful exploration, it would quickly draw more attention to the collaborative nature of science, and the fact that work on different stages of the lifecycle of ideas is valuable.
The main problem with relying only on prizes or new journals to encourage exploration is that they are probably hard to scale to an extent so that they would have a significant enough impact on scientists' career incentives.
Your paper argues that the problem in science is incentives, not that we've picked all the "low-hanging fruit" for scientific progress. What would a counterfactual need to look like to make you believe in the "low-hanging fruit" argument?
If we saw a scientific field try many different approaches over decades both in terms of career incentives and in terms of research directions, and the field still remained stagnant, then I would be more likely to believe that there are no more important secrets left in that particular area. The same goes for overall scientific progress.
Given the stagnation, we should try new approaches both in terms of what career incentives we give to scientists and in terms of diversity of research approaches. Relying on the "science has just become harder" explanation for the stagnation is convenient as it absolves everyone — scientists, administrators, and analysts — alike from any blame for the slowdown. But we shouldn't give up on trying to create a better future that easily.
Anthony Hennen is managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
