Year: 2022
Type: editorial
Abstract: Meta-research involves the interrogation of every stage of the research lifecycle, from conception to publication and dissemination.Looking back over the first six years of PLOS Biology Meta-Research Articles highlights the important insights that can be obtained from such "research on research".PLOS Biology has been publishing biological research articles for more than 18 years, but six years ago we decided to "go meta"-to recognise the growing need of the research community to scrutinise and challenge how it operates, in an effort to understand and improve the scientific enterprise.To do so, we launched a new article type, the Meta-Research Article, recruited new members to our editorial board to advise us on meta-research submissions and marked the event with an editorial [1] and a blog post.Reflecting on how the first six years of this initiative have played out has revealed some interesting trends.One intriguing observation is that the meta-research articles reveal an interest in all stages of the grand cycle of the research process (Fig 1), and that each stage brings its own biases.The research community itself is made up of a non-random selection of people.These individuals then choose to devote their efforts to a non-random series of topics.Those research efforts involve methods that may or may not exclude sources of bias from the authors or elsewhere.The research findings are then written up (or shoved into a "file drawer") with varying degrees of transparency and reporting detail.The resulting manuscripts are assessed by editors and reviewers who bring their own peccadillos to the table, and then published (or not) in journals of varying perceived status.Finally, the articles are disseminated in a number of ways and used or misused by multiple agents, some of whom use them to assess the worth of the researchers and thereby iteratively shape the researcher population.Each aspect of this cycle can be interrogated by meta-research, and indeed, even within the 43 Meta-Research Articles we have published to date, each aspect is well represented.Six themes that have emerged from this six-year corpus are summarized below, supported by a few choice examples. The composition and behavior of the research community. Any human activity is likelyto be influenced by the demographics of the relevant community, and scientific research is no exception.PLOS Biology studies have explored how factors such as research field, gender
Source: PLoS Biology
Authors: Roland G. Roberts, on behalf of the PLOS Biology Staff Editors
Institution: Public Library of Science
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $5,300
OpenAlex ID: W4210549872