Content of review 1, reviewed on March 07, 2020

The authors seem to forgot that currently more than 40 per cent of global R&D is now performed by just 200 companies and also that patents are a corporation game, because only in third world countries do universities produce more patents than corporations. In rich countries, patent applications from universities represent less than 10% of the overall volume. that means that corporate researchers are not driven by scientific impact (AKA citations) but by profit and profit alone so it seems that the authors are suggesting that researchers in universities should also be driven by the motto "show me the money".

That suggestion, however, has several major problems. First of all its not true that researchers in academia are driven by citations. No, they are not. At least in some places, they are already driven by funding, GET FUNDED OR DIE that drove a Full Professor of the Imperial College to commit suicide https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2019/09/imperial-collegegreat-scientists-leave.html and that´s why some many researchers in USA have faked funding applications and universities are now paying hundreds of millions to solve that mess https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/duke-university-pays-112m-settle-faked-research-lawsuit-n987316

Second, the neophilia (disease) suggested by the authors of the paper is already responsible for a rise in science misconduct. See also on this issue https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171511

And last but not least, if almost all researchers were focused on profit research and there were no incentives for curating science then who´s gone check the quality of corporate science? Who´s gone prevent corporate scandals like the 9 billion Theranos fake patents fraud?

See on this issue an extract below taken from a paper co-authored by the well know Stanford Professor John Ioannidis that analyzed almost 50 healthcare-related unicorns (startups with value in excess of 1 billion) including the Theranos fraud: “High‐valuation companies that publish little or nothing in the peer‐reviewed literature may still have patents related to their products. One may argue that patents undergo rigorous evaluation. However, patents do not offer the same level of documentation as peer‐reviewed articles. For example, Theranos had over 100 patents, but these were unable to supplant the vacuum in their evidence....when a team of investigators used the Theranos technology to run 22 common lab tests versus the same tests run with other companies’ technologies, the problematic error rates became manifest.." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13072

Source

    © 2020 the Reviewer (CC BY 4.0).

References

    Bhattacharya, J., Packalen, M. 2020. Stagnation and Scientific Incentives. National Bureau of Economic Research.