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      Honest signaling in academic publishing

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          Abstract

          Academic journals provide a key quality-control mechanism in science. Yet, information asymmetries and conflicts of interests incentivize scientists to deceive journals about the quality of their research. How can honesty be ensured, despite incentives for deception? Here, we address this question by applying the theory of honest signaling to the publication process. Our models demonstrate that several mechanisms can ensure honest journal submission, including differential benefits, differential costs, and costs to resubmitting rejected papers. Without submission costs, scientists benefit from submitting all papers to high-ranking journals, unless papers can only be submitted a limited number of times. Counterintuitively, our analysis implies that inefficiencies in academic publishing (e.g., arbitrary formatting requirements, long review times) can serve a function by disincentivizing scientists from submitting low-quality work to high-ranking journals. Our models provide simple, powerful tools for understanding how to promote honest paper submission in academic publishing.

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          Most cited references104

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          Job Market Signaling

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            PSYCHOLOGY. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science.

            Reproducibility is a defining feature of science, but the extent to which it characterizes current research is unknown. We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available. Replication effects were half the magnitude of original effects, representing a substantial decline. Ninety-seven percent of original studies had statistically significant results. Thirty-six percent of replications had statistically significant results; 47% of original effect sizes were in the 95% confidence interval of the replication effect size; 39% of effects were subjectively rated to have replicated the original result; and if no bias in original results is assumed, combining original and replication results left 68% with statistically significant effects. Correlational tests suggest that replication success was better predicted by the strength of original evidence than by characteristics of the original and replication teams.
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              False-positive psychology: undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant.

              In this article, we accomplish two things. First, we show that despite empirical psychologists' nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We present computer simulations and a pair of actual experiments that demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis. Second, we suggest a simple, low-cost, and straightforwardly effective disclosure-based solution to this problem. The solution involves six concrete requirements for authors and four guidelines for reviewers, all of which impose a minimal burden on the publication process.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS One
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                23 February 2021
                2021
                : 16
                : 2
                : e0246675
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, Human Technology Interaction Group, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
                [2 ] Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, United States of America
                [3 ] Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
                [4 ] School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
                [5 ] Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
                [6 ] Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
                University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: We note that Simine Vazire is a member of the PLOS Board of Directors and that Leonid Tiokhin and Daniel Lakens are co-founders of Red Team Market. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7333-0383
                Article
                PONE-D-20-19925
                10.1371/journal.pone.0246675
                7901761
                33621261
                8c191f55-0f53-440a-a082-18375b04afc8
                © 2021 Tiokhin et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 28 June 2020
                : 22 January 2021
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 0, Pages: 19
                Funding
                Funded by: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
                Award ID: 452-17-01
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: SES 1254291
                Award Recipient :
                LT and DL were supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) VIDI grant 452-17-01. KZ was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant SES 1254291. The funders had no role in any aspects of this study, the preparation of the manuscript, or the decision to publish.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Science Policy
                Science and Technology Workforce
                Careers in Research
                Scientists
                People and Places
                Population Groupings
                Professions
                Scientists
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Scientific Publishing
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Research Assessment
                Peer Review
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Deception
                Social Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Deception
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Information Economics
                Asymmetric Information
                Science Policy
                Research Integrity
                Conflicts of Interest
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Communications
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Research Assessment
                Research Quality Assessment
                Custom metadata
                No data was generated or analyzed for the current study. The minimal data set for this paper consists solely of mathematical equations, which can be found in the manuscript and supplementary materials.

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