午夜剧场

In my field of economics, there has been much discussion recently about the increasing page counts of papers submitted to international peer-reviewed journals. On July 23rd, the Wall Street Journal published an article with a headline beginning, "Economists Can't Write Economically." As the article notes, ideas that could actually be summarized in a few pages end up becoming papers of about 50 pages. One reason for this is that, to avoid rejection during the rigorous peer-review process, authors preemptively address potential criticisms from reviewers from various angles within the paper. Of course, the idea that a good paper is one with a meticulous analysis capable of withstanding criticism is persuasive, and it is almost unheard of for a paper with obvious errors to pass peer review in a famous professional journal.

For this reason, I also take great care regarding the reproducibility of estimations and simulations in my research. However, some papers have pointed out that many research results among those published in professional journals cannot be reproduced.

Consequently, people outside the research community sometimes suspect that "fraud for the sake of prestige or obtaining research funds is rampant among researchers." Therefore, various measures have been taken in recent years to prevent research misconduct. However, what is important here is the difference between intentional falsification or fabrication and unintentional errors that are not immediately obvious; the difference between these two is not always easy to understand. The former is a crime in research, but what is the latter?

In the 1980s and 90s in the United States, investigations into research misconduct involved Congress and prosecutors. Amidst this, Robert E. Pollack, a professor at Columbia University, wrote a piece for the New York Times stating, "Published error is at the heart of any real science." This likely means that if one is solely preoccupied with not making mistakes, one can only produce a rehash of already known facts, like a certified textbook. While a researcher should conduct research with the mindset that their work must withstand criticism, from the perspective of the original purpose of research—the pursuit of new things—errors are, in a sense, natural. I tell myself to think big in my research.