"The self-sacrificing quest for scientific rigour is displaced by the need to jockey among journals, and perhaps also engage in p-hacking to obtain interesting results."

How should we treat science’s growing pains?

"Under these harsh conditions, quality becomes instrumentalised. To strive for ‘excellence’ may be impractical; ‘impact’ is the name of the game. The self-sacrificing quest for scientific rigour is displaced by the need to jockey among journals, and perhaps also engage in p-hacking to obtain interesting results. Such conditions can go far to explain the distressing results that John Ionnidis first found a decade ago. But there is a deeper cause at work. Perhaps those who engage in what we might call ‘shoddy science’ or even ‘sleazy science’ don’t even know that it is sub-standard. The problem may have been building up for decades in the past, when standards gradually slipped and the basic skills of rigorous scientific work were allowed to atrophy. As evidence we have the current state of statistical practice, of which the best is as sophisticated and self-critical as possible, but where there is also much that is an insult."