Assessing Value in Biomedical Research The PQRST of Appraisal and Reward

Production of scientific work is regulated by reward systems. Scientists are typically rewarded for publish-ingarticles, obtaininggrants, andclaimingnovel, signifi-cant results.However, emphasisonpublicationcan lead to least publishable units, authorship inflation, and po-tentially irreproducible results.Emphasisonclaimingsig-nificant results leads to lackofpublicationofnonsignifi-cant high-quality studies or tomassagingdata toobtain “positive ” results. Emphasis onnovelty leavesno incen-tives to spend resources on replicating prior findings to probe their correctness. Data owners have apublishing advantagewithout incentives to sharewith competitor scientists. In the past, grapevine knowledge among the few knowledgeableexpertsalloweddiscerningthegoodwor