The Crisis in Academic Research

By Carole E. Scott

 

In a 2010 article in The Chronical of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hiak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble expressed concern about a trend in academic research that has only gotten worse since then. They observed that “while brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs.”

All over the world today in every academic discipline there is concern about a decline in the average quality of articles published in academic journals. Because today a larger share of college professors must publish or perish, there has been an increasing demand for journals to publish in. This has led to a proliferation of journals, some of whose standards are low or non-existent. One estimate puts the count at 1.8 million articles published each year in about 28,000 journals. Who actually reads those papers? According to one 2007 study, not many. However, university libraries are overwhelmed with the cost of stocking journals professors must consult in doing their research.

Academic administrators wielding carrots and sticks to force thousands of professors--some of whom may be excellent teachers--to publish at best mediocre articles that swell the profits of predatory publishers are responsible for a terrible misuse of a substantial amount of human and financial resources.

If in the 1950s, when professors’ salaries in real as well as nominal terms were much lower than today, a six-course annual teaching load was typical. Ten professors with a six course load teach 60 classes. With a 4-course load it would take fifteen. Later, in order to enable professors to do more research, professors’ load was often reduced to four. This made it necessary to increase the size of a department’s faculty and/or make use of graduate teaching assistants in order to teach the same sized classes. Increasing class size instead reduces the quality of the education provided students. Very large classes became common.

Industry and the government are major sources of the funding for academic research. In some disciplines much of it is basic and applied research. The objectivity of a great deal of academic research is questioned. Clearly not objective is the research companies have long paid university researchers to provide in order to help sway public opinion and influence public policy.

In a 2017 article, The Wall Street Journal revealed that tech giant Google had helped finance hundreds of research papers to defend itself against regulatory challenges of its market dominance.

“Some researchers share their papers before publication and let Google give suggestions, according to thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Journal in public-records requests of more than a dozen university professors. The professors don’t always reveal Google’s backing in their research, and few disclosed the financial ties in subsequent articles on the same or similar topics, the Journal found.”

In a 2017 article in Forbes, Steven Salzberg reported that “recent years have seen the appearance of journals from mainstream publishers that are based entirely on pseudoscience. On the surface, these publications look and act just like real scientific journals, but it's all just pretend. The publishers of these journals presumably care more about their bottom line than about  scientific integrity.”

In August 2018, Britain’s Guardian newspaper published an alarming article which claimed that “a vast ecosystem of predatory publishers is churning out ‘fake science”’ for profit,”

In their article in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, “The Great Divide Between Business School Research and Business Practice,” professors Isabellie Dostaler and Thomas J. Tomberlin argue that business schools slowly lost their relevance after the end of the 1950s when they undertook a major overhaul in response to harsh criticism about the state of theory and research in business administration levied by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Subsequently, academic journals in business published articles on topics that featured mathematics and academic jargon that caused practitioners to complain about the uselessness of abstract, theoretical academic articles.

In a 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review Warren Bennis and James O’Toole claimed that business schools lost their way when they began measuring themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research, thereby adopting a model of science that uses abstract financial and economic analysis, statistical multiple regressions, and laboratory psychology. “Some of the research produced is excellent, but because so little of it is grounded in actual business practices, the focus of graduate business education has become increasingly circumscribed—and less and less relevant to practitioners.”

In a 2018 article in the Harvard Business Review Debra K, Shariro and Bradley Kirkman contend that that the current way that business schools reward their professors’ make it very difficult for their professors to help practitioners improve the way they manage and have an impact in the real world. This is because promotions and salary increases at most business schools are primarily based on the number of articles a professor publishes in peer-reviewed “A” class journals or those appearing in journals with the highest impact factor or frequency of citation-counts.

The most “scientific” of the departments in business schools is economics. There are many similarities between academic research in accounting, finance, management, marketing, real estate and other business school disciplines and academic research in economics.

How academic economists are trained dominates how they conduct the research they publish. In the July-August 2018 issue of The Austrian Jorg Guido Hulsmann says that young economists today are taught to mimic the natural sciences. Coming from a variety of academic backgrounds in which they learned a little bit about applied mathematics, they are taught how to apply econometric methods to datasets. “You take,” he says, “one or two years of classes in econometrics, you’re there…You don’t need any knowledge of economic history, you don’t need any acquaintance with praxeological analysis, the logical analysis of human action, which we find in classical economics and in Austrian economics.”

Asad Zaman, a Pakistani professor, economist and social scientist, says Western intellectuals “went astray in economics and econometrics... Econometrics, he claims, conveys the impression that by using more and more sophisticated and complex technique, one can extract more and more information from the data set. This is an illusion--sophisticated techniques add more assumptions and hence they give even more false and misleading results.”

A questionable basic assumption is that most people make decisions on a rational basis based on sufficient information.

In the August 25-26, 2018 print issue of The Wall Street Journal Jason Qweig, a fan of behavioral economics, says that “as much as all of us investors wish we were perfectly logical calculating machines, we are human: emotional, distractible, impatient, inconsistent.”

A great deal of economic research is devoted to gathering the data needed to make economic forecasts. In a 2017 article in The Guardian, Adam Shaw concludes that “we are getting worse at making forecasts because the world is getting more complicated.” But, he claims, increased complexity is not the only problem. Forecasts are made less trustworthy because of a feedback loop. For example, if inflation is forecast to rise by 3%, workers will demand at least a 3% increase in wages, thereby changing the basis on which the forecast was made. As a result, inflation is likely to rise by more than 3%; thus the making of the forecast changes the reality being predicted.

Perhaps if Thorstein Veblen was alive today he would label a lot of today’s academic research “conspicuous scholarship” that benefits a university by enabling it to attract top researchers who make it possible to attract more students because of its resulting high ranking.