A science war is in full swing which has taken science's reproducibility crisis as a battleground. While conservatives and corporate interests use the crisis to weaken regulations, their opponent deny the existence of a science's crisis altogether. Thus, for the conservative National Association of Scholars NAS the crisis is real and due to the progressive assault on higher education with ideologies such as neo-Marxism, radical feminism, historicism, post-colonialism, deconstructionism, post-modernism, liberation theology. In the opposite field, some commentators claim that there (...) is no crisis in science and that saying the opposite is irresponsible. These positions are to be seen in the context of the ongoing battle against regulation, of which the new rules proposed at the US Environmental Protection Agency are but the last chapter. In this optic, Naomi Oreskes writes on Nature that what constitutes the crisis is the conservatives' attack on science. This evident right-left divide in the reading of the crisis is unhelpful and dangerous to the survival of science itself. An alternative reading ignored by the contendents would suggest that structural contradictions have emerged in modern science, and that addressing these should be the focus of our attention. (shrink)

The disconnect problem arises wherever there is ongoing and severe discordance between the scientific assessment of a politically relevant issue, and the politics and legislation of said issue. Here, we focus on the disconnect problem as it arises in the case of climate change, diagnosing a failure to respect the necessary tradeoff between authority and autonomy within a public institution like science. After assessing the problematic deployment of scientific authority in this arena, we offer suggestions for how to mitigate climate (...) change’s particular disconnect problem, as well as more general proposals for reforming science advising. (shrink)

Despite continued attention, finding adequate criteria for distinguishing “good” from “bad” scholarly journals remains an elusive goal. In this essay, I propose a solution informed by the work of Imre Lakatos and his methodology of scientific research programmes (MSRP). I begin by reviewing several notable attempts at appraising journal quality – focusing primarily on the impact factor and development of journal blacklists and whitelists. In doing so, I note their limitations and link their overarching goals to those found within the (...) philosophy of science. I argue that Lakatos’s MSRP and specifically his classifications of “progressive” and “degenerative” research programmes can be analogized and repurposed for the evaluation of scholarly journals. I argue that this alternative framework resolves some of the limitations discussed above and offers a more considered evaluation of journal quality – one that helps account for the historical evolution of journal-level publication practices and attendant contributions to the growth (or stunting) of scholarly knowledge. By doing so, the seeming problem of journal demarcation is diminished. In the process I utilize two novel tools (the mistake index and scite index) to further illustrate and operationalize aspects of the MSRP. (shrink)

Summary Points -/- Some 1500 documents revealed in litigation provide unprecedented insights into how pharmaceutical companies promote drugs, including the use of vendors to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals. Dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and supplements were used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms of menopausal hormone therapy (HT), and to cast raloxifene and other competing therapies in a negative light. Specifically, the pharmaceutical company Wyeth used ghostwritten articles to mitigate (...) the perceived risks of breast cancer associated with HT, to defend the unsupported cardiovascular “benefits” of HT, and to promote off-label, unproven uses of HT such as the prevention of dementia, Parkinson's disease, vision problems, and wrinkles. Given the growing evidence that ghostwriting has been used to promote HT and other highly promoted drugs, the medical profession must take steps to ensure that prescribers renounce participation in ghostwriting, and to ensure that unscrupulous relationships between industry and academia are avoided rather than courted. (shrink)