What if Peer-Review Process Is Killing Thinking-Out-of-the-Box Science?

Abstract

Scientific ideas and hypotheses may be accepted, refuted, criticized, or subject to rebuttal by researchers (e.g., Mayo and Spanos, 2008). Dogmas do not belong to the territory of science, and ending up in uncharted territories should be the most encouraging and hopeful achievement for a researcher (Lampel, 2016). However, modern science is quite different than the ideal image of a scientist in a lab coat looking for new results or staring to the horizon. The scientific world, instead of being supported by inspiration in search of new ideas or deep thinking, is now dominated by other aspects (Byers, 2014;King et al., 2018). Scientists are meticulously evaluated by their work, i.e., scientific contributions, funded projects, student tuition, and outreach activities, among others (Bornmann and Marx, 2014). To be promoted or to get a permanent position, several "tick boxes" need to be filled, especially those concerning paper production and funding securing (e.g., Moher et al., 2018;Schimanski and Alperin, 2018). These are often disconnected from the genuine goals of science, such as producing out-of-the-box ideas that are generally difficult to spread and accept (Wang et al., 2017;Mairesse and Pezzoni, 2021) or subjecting previous proposals to empirical testing to explore their reliability, a type of task that Scheiner (2013) considered as deficient in ecology. Thus, most researchers spend their time trying to get the ball rolling in this environment (Milem et al., 2000;Link et al., 2008).We are living in a zeitgeist where the number of scientific contributions is steadily increasing year after year, with hundreds of thousands of available journals to showcase our work (Larsen and Von Ins, 2010;To and Yu, 2020). However, this spectacular increase of production is not correlated to the number of new ideas, ways of thinking, or, at least, "discoveries" (Fried, 2020;Bhattacharya and Packalen, 2020). Slicing papers, multi-author contributions, revisions of reviews, meta-analyses, and empirically untested modeling approaches solely based on pure mathematics (Vora, 2018;Tolsgaard et al., 2019;Lee-Yaw et al., 2021) are on the spot, dominating the issues in elite journals (Ketcham and Crawford, 2007;Fontelo and Liu, 2018). So, the point is-why are we not developing new ideas in science as fast as we are publishing papers? Particularly, why are unconventional theories lacking despite the enormous scientific production?Let us go to the current model of peer review and see a common situation of a flawed process (Smith, 2006) and how it affects the development of new ideas or theories-for example-a review or a paper with meta-analysis that compiles information from previous papers is a "shining diamond" for journals if the topic is sound and timely. This piece of science would receive loads of citations, which is so good for the journal and for the authors, even better if as contributors there is a

Building a truly diverse biodiversity science

“…Thus, we encourage debate as a central part of the editorial process, allowing well-grounded and clearlyidentified speculation and policy-related statements in published papers when appropriate. This may include publishing nonconventional papers that foster discussion in established topics or open new research avenues 21 , if and only if they are well supported by data or published evidence. In this sense, we welcome Comments on areas currently under discussion, as well as Reviews and Perspectives that allow synthesis in theoretical and practical topics that are not necessarily general, but can help advance specific subdisciplines or topics.…”