Research cartels will abolish genuine science
Tags: collaboration, competition, grant proposal, Scientific community, social networkingPosted in Ethics, Presentations quality, Research and education
Ever-increasing competition for unfairly limited funding is backfiring. Territorial allocations and research topic fixing is hurting the creativity of researchers and specially demotivating the younger generation.
The title of this post may sound too provocative, but let me quote three dialogs, which I have witnessed in the last six months, to show how real this threat is. You may have heard such conversations as well.
- Prof. A tells visitor B: “Your research suggestion is indeed interesting and we can do it but prof. C may want to do it as well, and he is a good friend.”
- Young senior D replies to junior E’s proposal of trying slightly different samples: “Those kind of samples are investigated by Prof. F and this is a very competitive field.”
- Senior G, who is planning to submit a proposal, hears about the intention of Prof. H, who works on a similar subject and wants to submit a proposal as well. He decides to make sure their proposal titles are different before submission.













Readers' comments
Thanks for the advice. It sounds almost too simple and like something people should come up by themselves. Unfortunately, most ...
19 Jul 2010 8:46, Julio E. Peironcely
Getting grants funded is a much less platonic enterprise than the science itself. I recently ran into a science professor ...
20 Jun 2010 19:32, Gijs
Hi, One question - where would you include correspondence? Some journals e.g. Nature publish "Letters" as full articles, whereas, correspondence elsewhere ...
11 Jun 2010 23:09, MH
I agree with what have been said above. Should the normalization be done against the total number of publications he/she authored/co-authored ...
8 Jun 2010 23:08, labuddy
I spent the spare time on the unfinished ideas,because the working time is controlled strictly by the boss and ...
7 Jun 2010 14:26, danxian