英国《经济学人》杂志是一本有国际影响的杂志。这本杂志10月7号刊登了一篇关于科学出版的文章叫Publish and be Wrong。文章的逻辑是：太多的论文在追逐少数几本名气高的期刊，最终导致的结果可能是：能够发表在这些名气比较高的期刊上的论文都是吸引眼球但没有实际价值的，而且三五年内往往被同行证明是错误的。

文章拿经济学领域的一个理论做比较。在经济学领域，有一个理论叫“The winner's curse”，暂时翻译为“赢者的诅咒”吧。拿一次拍卖会作例子，拍卖的价格理论上应该是物品真实的价值，但最终赢得拍卖的，往往会付出比真实价值高得多的价格。

Publish and be wrong

IN ECONOMIC theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.

The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.

全文链接见：http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376658

 

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