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Guaspare-Cartron, Catherine/Didier, Emmanuel (2020)In: Biagioli, Mario/Lippman, Alexandra (eds.), Gaming the metrics. Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 157‑167. Open Access.EXTRACT“The literature offers some explanations for the apparent increase of misconduct cases (Steen, Casadevall, and Fang, 2013). One could argue that the barriers to publication have been lowered in the last twenty years or so, thus letting more scientists publish fraudulent articles. But this argument has limitations. First, it does not explain why the barriers to publications have been lowered. Second, over the same period, we have witnessed a series of public scandals triggered by findings of misconduct. Given that one of the social functions of scandal is precisely to enforce norms (Dampierre, 1954; Molotch and Lester, 1973; Boltanski, Claverie, and Offenstadt, 2007; Adut, 2008), we should not expect to find scandals if there was a simple lowering of the quality requirements in science. A different explanation is offered by the scientists themselves who often complain that they are under pressure, which may tempt them to produce subquality science. But the problem with the word “pressure” (which, by the way, is shared with many other professions from the police to medical doctors [Bruno and Didier, 2013]) is that it is mainly a complaint, a denunciation. It is not analytical. Our hypothesis is that certain dimensions of the practice of science have experienced important transformations in the last twenty years, caused in part by the performative effects of metrics. These innovations have blurred the previous norms regulating scientific practices. At the same time, a new ecology (Star, 1995) of watchdogs and fraud detection has emerged that gives increased visibility to cases of misconduct, which in turn stir public controversies or “affairs” through which norms are re-instantiated.” (p. 157/158)Download link