How the Academia-Cyberspace-Pharmaceutical-Biotech-Publishing Complex Incentivizes Bad Brain Research

Countless times on this blog, I have discussed poor quality research about brains. An interesting question to ponder is: why is there so much bad research done about brains? Why do we see so many studies guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes and a lack of blinding protocols? Why do many scientific papers make claims about their observations that are not justified by any observations reported in the paper? Why do we have so many misleading stories in the press claiming that some brain research showed something that it did not actually show?

In my previous post "Why the Academia Cyberspace Profit Complex Keeps Giving Misleading Brain Research" I made a fairly good start at answering such questions. I identified a social network I called the academia cyberspace profit complex, and I explained some of the reasons why that complex incentivizes poor quality but interesting-sounding brain research.  Among the factors I identified were these:

• Professors tend to be judged these days by the "easy-to-quantify" metrics of the number of papers they have written or co-written, and the number of citations such papers get, rather than a "hard-to-quantify" metric of  the quality of the research procedures they followed. 
• The more "quick and dirty" studies scientists publish (studies that are relatively easy to produce, but do not involve very high standards of research quality), the higher a "papers published count" a scientist will have. 
• Scientific journals these days have a high bias called "publication bias," a tendency to prefer to publish papers reporting some supposed "positive effect" supposedly involving some causal relation rather than a null result reporting no such causal relation. 
• The more interesting-sounding or important-sounding a paper may be, the greater the likelihood that it will be cited by other scientists, and the higher the "citation count" of the scientist authors will be. 
• The desire to produce interesting-sounding or important-sounding papers reporting "positive effects" rather than null results tends to bias the way papers are written and the way studies are designed and performed, creating an incentive for study designs likely to end up with some "positive result" rather than a null result.  Among the resulting effects is often "cherry picking" of data, so that the paper ends up with a "publishable" positive effect rather than a null result.
• Once a study has been published in a scientific journal, it is announced to the public by means of a university press release or college press release. Nowadays university press offices are notorious for their hype and exaggeration, and routinely make interesting-sounding claims about new research that are not justified by the observations in the scientific paper being announced.  An abundance of such hype helps to glorify universities, keep them in the public's eyes, and helps to justify the very high tuition rates of universities. Misstatements in press releases come both from press office copywriters who are encouraged to glorify and hype new research, but also from scientists quoted in the press releases, who often make unwarranted or false claims about their own research, in an effort to maximize the attention such research will get. 
• There is nowadays an extremely large cyberspace industry that has an incentive to uncritically parrot university press releases, and an additional incentive to further exaggerate and hype the results reported by such press releases.  The incentive comes in the form of web pages containing ads that generate revenue for the owners of web pages.  So we see an enormous "clickbait" effect, in which sensational-sounding headlines appear on web pages, with the headlines being hyperlinks that take the reader to a page filled with ads.  Every time a page with such ads is viewed, money is generated for the owner of the web site.  The "clickbait" headlines often take you to pages discussing research that never justifies the sensational clickbait headline. For example, you may see on some web page a headline "Scientists Make Giant Leap in Understanding Memory." Clicking on that headline will typically take you to some story about merely another very poorly designed study using mice, something that is no actual progress in understanding memory. 
• "Quick and dirty" scientific research helps science journalists fill their quotas of science stories. Knowing that web sites prefer to publish stories with sensational-sounding headlines, science journalists are incentivized to "go with the hype" rather than critically discussing poorly designed research. 
• The increase in "papers published" counts and citation counts resulting from "quick and dirty" research helps scientists meet paper count quotas and citation quotas that may be informally required for their promotion or advancement, and increases their chances of getting profit from things such as book deals and consulting contracts. 

My previous post discussed many of the factors that incentivize poorly designed and executed scientific research. But I left out a discussion of several very important additional factors:

• Nowadays pharmaceutical companies may have a very large incentive to fund and/or promote poorly designed and executed brain research, particularly whenever such research helps to promote some pill that such companies sell. The mental health  pharmaceutical industry is estimated to be a 36 billion dollar industry. 
• Nowadays biotech companies may have a very large incentive to fund and/or promote poorly designed and executed brain research, particularly whenever such research helps to promote some device that such companies sell. Biotech companies include very many companies such as the manufacturers of MRI devices, the manufacturers of EEG equipment, the manufacturers of implantable medical devices, and the manufacturers of noninvasive brain-related devices that a person may put on his head. The biotech industry is a trillion-dollar industry, and many billions of that involves brain-related products. 
• Nowadays the publishers of scientific papers have a very large incentive to publish poorly designed and executed brain research, simply because a profusion of such "quick and dirty" papers means more available newly written papers that can be published. The more papers published, the more journals can be published, and the more journal subscription fees can be charged.  According to one site, "The worldwide revenue from academic publishing stands at over $19 billion per year," and that "out of this figure, over 50% is attributed to 5 major publishing companies – Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE."
• Scientists doing brain research often have conflicts of interest, such as the ownership of shares of corporations that may increase in value if the research reports a particular type of result, or something like a relationship in which the scientists get consulting fees from some corporation whose fate may be affected by the research they are doing. 
• Nowadays much of brain-related research is funded largely or mainly by private corporations interested in having the research find some particular result. 
• The relationship between private industry and brain-related research is so strong that many scientific papers are essentially "ghost written" by anonymous employees of corporations standing to benefit if the research reports a particular result. 

To diagram these complex relations and financial motivations, I must present a diagram much larger than the relation diagram that I presented in my earlier post. The revised diagram is below:

The diagram shows a complex stream of profits that results from scientists starting out by doing "quick and dirty" poorly designed research.  The result is a set of winners and losers.  

The Winners

These are the winners from "quick and dirty" brain-related research:

• The scientists who get some additional paper with their name on it to increase their "papers published" count, and also may get some more of the highly coveted paper citations. Many of these scientists are heavy investors in pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies (or recipients of income from such sources), and indirectly profit when such companies profit in the ways described below. 
• The universities who can announce important-sounding research by some exaggerating press release, thereby helping to maintain their prominent public profile, and their reputation as a center of "cutting edge" research. 
• The science journalists who get some new sensational-sounding press release that they can use as the basis for some interesting-sounding article that will help them fill their quota of articles written. 
• The owners of web pages that will announce the results using clickbait headlines leading to pages containing ads that generate money for the people running the web sites. 
• The pharmaceutical companies that may benefit when a specific product of theirs is favorably mentioned by the new scientific paper, and who also in general benefit when literature keeps people thinking that brains are the source of our minds and our mental problems, and keeps people thinking that the way to solve psychological problems is by taking pills. 
• The biotech device  companies that may benefit when a specific product of theirs is favorably mentioned by the new scientific paper, and who also in general benefit when literature keeps people thinking that brains are the source of our minds and our mental problems, and keeps people thinking that brain-related devices can help solve mental problems or mood problems. 
• The publishers of expensive scientific journals, who can meet their monthly quotas of papers to be published (for such publishers it is financially better for there to be written in any month 800 poorly-written papers describing poorly designed papers and 200 well-written papers describing well-designed papers, than for there to be written in the same month 100 poorly-written papers describing poorly designed papers and 300 well-written papers describing well-designed papers).

The Losers

These are the losers from "quick and dirty" brain-related research:

• All the people in the general public, who keep being misled by "science news" headlines giving them the wrong idea about the source of their minds and the storage place of their memories, and who keep reading research reports which give them the wrong idea that they are mere brains rather than souls, minds or spirits. The resulting psychological, moral and spiritual harm is enormous but incalculable. 
• Very many people with psychological problems or emotional problems or learning problems who are given the wrong idea that the way to help such problems is by fiddling with brains or brain chemistry, rather than by improving education techniques and educational literature, improving access to education and counseling,  improving social conditions, improving social justice, improving family relations or improving worldviews and positive attitudes about selves by properly educating people so that they learn about the most important facts and observations related to who they are and how they got here. 

In a classic essay, the distinguished military officer Smedley Butler stated this: "War is a racket...It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many." It is true to say exactly that about junk science research.  The production of such research is a racket, for the benefit of the few beneficiaries listed above, at the expense of everyone else. 

Long story short, if you want to know why so much junk research gets published about brains, follow the money and ponder who profits. But it would be an oversimplification to suggest that financial interests and career advancement offers a full explanation for why we see so much bad brain-related research and so much bad reporting about such research. Another important factor is that poorly-designed, poorly-executed and poorly-described research relating to brains helps to provide what can be regarded as belief system justification. We should not forget that those behind such research are members of a belief community with cherished dogmas that they keep claiming are facts but which are very much unproven, such as the dogma that your brain produces your mind and thinking, and the dogma that your brain stores your beliefs and memories.  Members of such a community get a non-financial mental reward whenever there appears research which they can claim as evidence their beliefs are correct. In cases when unfounded beliefs are held and cherished,  poorly-designed poorly-executed and inaccurately-described research can provide a comforting feeling of assurance that well-designed well-executed and accurately-described research might never be able to provide.