Publication Bias Favoring Confirmation and Failure to Replicate Are Growing Science Problems That Affect Focus and Funding

      Has science become biased in favor of publishing papers that confirm previous results? Hannah Frey of Climate Compass writes about this issue. She first notes how scientific breakthroughs are announced. They tend to focus on the latest innovations that led to the breakthrough rather than the years of development that led to it. She writes:

“The generation of new data and scientific publications at an unprecedented rate has led to a culture of "publish or perish," making it harder to slow down and do the kind of deep, patient work that eventually leads to genuine discovery. The quiet decades before the breakthrough are rarely part of the story.”

     She notes that science has a pretty serious replication problem and 70% of scientific results failed to be replicated when attempted. She notes that this suggests that some discoveries may not be new discoveries at all if they are not able to be replicated. She writes:

“Science has a structural problem with negative results. When an experiment fails to confirm a hypothesis, it tends to vanish. Journals prefer findings that are positive and statistically striking.”

“Flawed study designs and a "publication bias" that favors confirmatory results are longtime sources of concern within the research community. This creates a skewed archive, where the public record of science looks far more consistent than the actual process ever was. Various factors have been suggested as contributing to this replication crisis, including selective reporting, insufficiently detailed methodology descriptions, p-hacking, poor theoretical design, small sample sizes, coding mistakes, and the unavailability of code and data.”

“Each of these is a real and correctable problem, but they rarely come up in the press releases announcing the next big thing.”

     Research labs depend on funding that is difficult to secure, and those who provide it tend to want to see useful results. She notes that in 2025, 7,800 grants were cancelled or suspended in the U.S. The Trump administration's cuts likely led to a significant amount of funding being cancelled or suspended. Up to 25,000 early career scientists either left their fields or left the country. Due in part to American R&D cuts, China is now investing as much in R&D as the U.S. She mentions the stresses on young scientists:

“The culture that demands relentless productivity, constant grant applications, and peer-reviewed output before ideas are fully formed creates conditions where burnout is common and quiet.”

     Next, she considers the slowness of science and getting from R to D:

“The gap between a proof of concept and a practical application is often a decade or more.”

     She notes that funding often determines what science gets done. Projects that are more likely to generate demonstration projects and show more promise for commercialization are more likely to get funded, and that is generally a good thing. She writes:

“Historian Philip Mirowski argues that the decline of scientific quality can be connected to its commodification, especially spurred by major corporations' profit-driven decision to outsource their research to universities and contract research organizations. When the research agenda is shaped by what is fundable rather than what is fundamental, certain categories of discovery become less likely. The public rarely sees that filter at work.”

     Some people think that the replication crisis is a precursor to an existential crisis for science.

“Researchers are advocating for both immediate changes in practice and larger structural changes in incentives for scientific behavior, focusing on making research more open and transparent through tools such as open materials, open data, preregistration, and multisite collaborative research studies. These are meaningful steps. They're also a signal that the system, as currently constructed, cannot be taken for granted.”

“The breakthroughs will keep coming - the question is whether the conditions that make them possible will hold.”

     

References:

 

The side of a major scientific breakthrough nobody discusses publicly. Hannah Frey. Climate Compass. July 15, 2026. The side of a major scientific breakthrough nobody discusses publicly