The academic backlog

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Here’s an interesting
question to ask any scientist: If you were to receive no more research funding,
and just focus on writing up the data you have, how long would it take? The
answer tends to go up with seniority, but a typical answer is 3 to 5 years.

I don’t have any hard
data on this – just my own experience and that of colleagues – and I suspect it
varies from discipline to discipline. But my impression is that people generally
agree that the academic backlog is a real phenomenon, but they disagree on
whether it matters.

One view is that
completed but unpublished research is not important, because there’s a kind of
“survival of the fittest” of results. You focus on the most interesting and
novel findings, and forget about the rest. It’s true that we’ve all done failed studies with inconclusive results,
and it would be foolish trying to turn such sow’s ears into silk purses.  But I suspect there’s a large swathe of
research that doesn’t fall into that category, but still never gets written up.  Is that right, given the time and money that
have been expended in gathering data? Indeed, in clinical fields, it’s not only
researchers putting effort into the research – there are also human participants
who typically volunteer for studies on the assumption that the research will be
published.

I’m not talking about
research that fails to get published because it’s rejected by journal editors,
but rather about studies that don’t get to the point of being written up for
publication. Interest in this topic has been stimulated by Ben Goldacre’s book
Bad Pharma, which has highlighted the numerous clinical trials that go
unreported – often because they have negative results. In that case the concern
is that findings are suppressed because they conflict with the financial
interests of those doing the research, and the Alltrials campaign is doing a sterling job to tackle that issue. But beyond the field of clinical trials, there’s still a
backlog, even for those of us working in areas where financial interests are
not an issue.



It’s worth pausing to
consider why this is so. I think it’s all to do with the incentive structure of
academia. If you want to make your way in the scientific world, there are two
important things you have to do: get grant funding and publish papers. This
creates an optimisation problem, because both of these activities take time,
and time is in short supply for the average academic.  It’s impossible to say how long it takes to
write a paper, because it will depend on the complexity of the data, and will
vary from one subject area to the next, but it’s not something that should be
rushed. A good scientist checks everything thoroughly, thinks hard about
alternative interpretations of results, and relates findings to the existing research
literature. But if you take too much time, you’re at risk of being seen as
unproductive, especially if you aren’t bringing in grant income. So you have to
apply for grants, and having done so, you have then to do the research that you
said you’d do. You may also be under pressure to apply for grants to keep your
research group going, or to fund your own salary.



When
I started in research, a junior person would be happy to have one grant, but that
was before the REF. Nowadays  heads of
department  will encourage their staff to
apply for numerous grants, and it’s commonplace for senior investigators have
several active grants, with estimates of around 1-2 hours per week spent on
each one. Of course, time isn’t neatly divided up, and it’s more likely that
the investigator will get the project up and running and then delegate it to
junior staff, then putting in additional hours at the end of the project when
it’s time to analyse and write up the data. The bulk of the day-to-day work will
be done by postdocs or graduate students, and it can be a good training
opportunity for them. All the same, it’s often the case that the amount of time
specified by senior investigators is absurdly unrealistic. Yet this approach is encouraged: I doubt anyone ever questions a senior
investigator’s time commitment when evaluating a grant, few funding bodies
check whether you’ve done what you said you’d do, and even if they do, I’ve
never heard of a funder demanding that a previous project be written up before
they’ll consider a new funding application.

I don’t think the
research community is particularly happy about this: many people have a sense
of guilt at the backlog, but they feel they have no option. So the current
system creates stress as well as inefficiency and waste. I’m not sure what the
solution is, but I think this is something that research funders should start
thinking about. We need to change the incentives to allow people time to think.
I don’t believe anyone goes into science because they want to become rich and
famous: we go into it because we are excited by ideas and want to discover new
things. But just as bankers seem to get into a spiral of greed whereby they
want higher and higher bonuses, it’s easy to get swept up in the need to prove
yourself by getting more and more grants, and to lose sight of the whole
purpose of the exercise – which should be to do good, thoughtful science.  We won’t get the right people staying in the
field if we value people solely in terms of research income, rather than in
terms of whether they use that income efficiently and effectively.