![]() Some scientists, however, worry Matters could exacerbate another problem: the long-standing practice of slicing a large body of findings into many manuscripts, in order to boost authorship numbers. "We want to reward scientists for honesty, curiosity and the quality of their work-not just good storytelling," Rajendran says. "Today's journals however, favor story-telling over observations, and congruency over complexity … Moreover, incentives associated with publishing in high-impact journals lead to loss of scientifically and ethically sound observations that do not fit the storyline, and in some unfortunate cases also to fraudulence." "Observations, not stories, are the pillars of good science," the journal's editors write on Matters' website. Launched on 5 November, the open-access online journal aims to boost integrity and speed the communication of science by allowing researchers to publish discrete observations rather than complete stories. Those ponderings eventually spurred the creation of Matters. Those experiences made Rajendran wonder: Was the pressure to publish tempting authors to improperly tweak their findings in order to create more cohesive stories? If researchers could report just the one finding they felt comfortable with, Rajendran mused, perhaps "there would be no need to be dishonest." Certain figures from those retracted manuscripts were subsequently published elsewhere, he discovered. His concerns about scientific publishing grew as he studied several flawed papers that had been yanked from high-profile journals. ![]() He now heads a laboratory at the University of Zürich in Switzerland and has won awards for his research on Alzheimer's disease.īut the colleague's comment long troubled him, Rajendran says, because he felt it overemphasized "the label on my papers" from a prestigious journal. ![]() The journal accepted both papers and Rajendran, 40, who grew up poor in rural India, got the job. About 8 years ago, when he was a postdoctoral researcher, cell biologist Lawrence Rajendran was applying for a job when a colleague predicted that, if he could get two papers he had co-authored published by Science, "you're sure to get the position."Īs it turned out, the colleague was right.
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