How to stop the progress of science

“I realize that in effect, I have done a lot of harm to science.”

I am personally responsible for arresting or at least creating hurdles in the progress of multiple fields of science and I proudly take the blame on myself. Any curious person working outside the temples of greater gods of science can easily put hurdles in the path of research and all he/she has to do for this is to do good research.  Good research by a lesser scientist stops the progress of science.

Sounds strange? Yes, it is weird, but the weirdness comes from the weird structure of academia; especially the career paths. As I have said many times, doing good science and doing a successful career in science are two independent things, not correlated too well. In fact there are certain trade-offs between the two. You need to compromise on at least a few aspects of science if you want to build a great career in the present day academia. The way the career path creates hurdles in science is not difficult to perceive, but is generally not realized and not said explicitly.

What motivates a young researcher to investigate a certain field? It should ideally be curiosity, a troublesome question, a serious problem faced by the society and the like. The factors that actually decide what a career minded researcher decides to work on are: good chances of getting results, the potential to publish in good journals, the possibility of being the first in discovering or achieving something etc. The two might overlap at times but more commonly stand in contrast and in conflict as well.

On the other hand are the biases in peer reviews and the journal prestige. Young researchers in more reputed institutions have better chances of publishing in high ranking journals provided they meet certain criteria. They tend to chose what to work on based on the chances of fulfilling these criteria. Any replication of a new result is important for science but is unlikely to give a high impact paper. Replicating experiments does not improve career prospects. Therefore testing the reproducibility of any experiment is not the preferred line of work by ambitious researchers. The entire reproducibility crisis is because of this factor.

In contrast, novel concepts or path breaking research is not expected from children of the lesser god. Even if they do so, they can’t publish in prestigious journals since the most likely fate is desk rejection by only looking at the name of the country, university or institution. They are most likely to end up publishing in low prestige journals. As a result their work is hardly read and cited by anyone, citing a paper from a lesser journal is below dignity for the elite researchers.

So what happens when someone from an obscure background publishes a real break-through or opens up potentially a new line of work?

It is simple. That line of work will never progress. There are three ways in which this new line could have progressed. One is that the person gets sufficient funding to further the work he/she pioneered. Second could be that someone from the elite class recognizes the importance of the concept and takes an initiative to collaborate. The third, someone from the elite class develops the same thinking independently and takes it ahead with or without giving due credit to the third world scientist. In the last case there might be injustice to the third world scientist but science does progress. Even in the second case the elite may carry forward the work without collaborating or giving credit to the original discoverer. This again is unfair but science would progress nevertheless. That’s not so bad in my view. There are multiple examples of this in the history of science.

In today’s world of rapid literature accessibility, none of this is very likely. The poor original discoverer will not get funded because the concept does not come from the elite. Their work will not be taken seriously in the field since it is published in a lesser journal. Even if an elite researcher thinks of the idea independently, is excited by it and is convinced that this can bring in revolution, but discovers that someone has published it already, will not take it forward because that will not give a big career boost to him/her. The net result is that all the three paths of progress are blocked and this line of work gets arrested in spite of its potential in giving revolutionary insights.

This is what happened to my science throughout my life. I was not career conscious, but merely fond of ideas. I pursued a number of novel ideas in diversity of fields, showed their mathematical and logical soundness, supported them with evidence, primary experiments, secondary data, made testable predictions some of which accidently got tested and found support. Some of them have the potential to give a complete new turn to the field, open up new lines of thinking. But nothing of this happened or is likely to happen in near future. Nobody found any flaws in my arguments, nobody doubted their validity and relevance to the field, I came to know that some giants in the field were quite aware of what I published and appreciated it in private. Still nothing happened further on these lines. I never got funded to continue work on my own idea. (I did get huge funding at times but that was only when I towed the line of a giant in the field.) I could not publish my original ideas in the top ranking journals because they were declined every time without review. Some of the ideas were very obvious but just a little ahead of time. So I can’t believe that no one else thought of these any time independently. But once I published first, there was no body interested in them.

I realize that in effect, I have done a lot of harm to science. Anyone working outside the mainstream community and doing good science actually creates hurdles in the progress of science. Whom shall we blame for these hurdles? It seems to be a crime to do creative research, generate novel and sound ideas outside the main stream and someone like me is a criminal in the field.