The Curse of Premature Publication

There's an interesting editorial in Nature journal about the need to introduce "thinking time" into the daily schedules of scientists who otherwise work frantically and frenetically, with their research endlessly disrupted by Emails, mobile phone calls, meetings and so forth.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02381-x

The article makes many good points, but it is preoccupied with the practicalities of work scheduling, psychological aspects etc, and devotes hardly any space to the quality of research and the curse of premature publication.  On this blog I have discussed, on many occasions, the pressures on academics to publish as frequently as possible, and to place quantity far ahead of quality on their lists of priorities.  The pressure isn't exerted just on the researchers at the coal face -- heads of departments, university press offices and even vice chancellors want their institutions to be up there at the top of the rankings, based increasingly not on the quality of teaching but on the weight of research output.

In my mind, there is no doubt at all that this obsession with rapid and frequent publication has driven the research efforts of MPP and his colleagues.  Over and again they have written mediocre papers in which suppositions and assertions have taken the place of hard evidence.  There are scores of them, written far too early and therefore incapable of withstanding proper scrutiny -- but nonetheless accompanied by extravagant claims and banner headlines in the media...........

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2016/08/are-archaeologists-especially-prone-to.html

What we are seeing at the moment is a wholesale retreat from many of the things claimed as "the truth" over the last decade.   The provenancing of the Stonehenge bluestones is not at all as accurate as Bevins, Ixer and others have claimed, and far from pointing to one or two "key locations" from which bluestone monoliths might have been extracted, the work has flagged up the fact that the bluestones and the fragments in the local landscape have come from at least 46 different locations.  The number is going up all the time, as research continues.  The geologists should have given themselves more thinking time, and they should have been more careful.  The more people examine the "bluestone quarrying" hypothesis, the more ludicrous it appears -- and fewer and fewer people are prepared to accept it as fact.  The "lost circle" at Waun Mawn, hyped so cynically and irresponsibly in that infamous BBC TV programme, is now dead and buried, and it is widely accepted -- even by MPP himself -- that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge.

OK -- the perpetrators of the Stonehenge bluestone mythology will say that they are honest scientists collecting evidence, publishing their results, developing working hypotheses, testing them, and sometimes rejecting them.  Well yes, that may be a fine line to take, but it doesn't wash with me when the "honest scientists" concerned completely ignore inconvenient evidence and steadfastly refuse to cite inconvenient peer-reviewed research papers which draw conclusions different to their own.  That, within a research community, is rather a serious crime.

The foolishness of the "bluestone mythologisers" is apparent when one looks at the new video produced by Carol and Jacky and now viewed by 26,000 people.  

https://youtu.be/GoobiRgv50g?si=SiKoBHcpAzs6QQUv

In the comments list published on YouTube, hardly any commentators are supportive of the MPP line, and one contributor after another expresses despair or disappointment at the lack of hard evidence backing up his pronouncements.  What they are doing, using a different form of wards, is attacking what Barclay and Brophy referred to as "interpretative inflation".   Many members of the public may be gullible, but when it comes to the crunch most of them are not so stupid as to accept everything said to them by a soggy archaeologist on a bleak Pembrokeshire hillside.......

So -- more thinking time and less haste?  Yes please.