Originally a comment by Rob on Quick, hide the data.

There are days when I just wish I could tell someone to hand over their science card. There’s always been bad science (especially in medicine and social ‘sciences’ frankly), but the neoliberal trashing of universities, research institutions, and education to make nearly all science demonstrate a commercial applicability or to have regular output has been especially corrosive. Now, if you don’t publish on the regular you’re toast. If you publish negative or ambiguous results, you’re toast. If your work is interesting, but doesn’t have a commercial application, you’re toast.

It’s resulted in not just fraudulent work, but a massive rise in sloppy, poorly thought out work designed to deliver quickly produced small papers that appear to show a good or promising result, but require further study. It’s about career continuity, not quality of thought. A side effect is that there is far less fundamental and pure exploratory research being done in pretty much every field of endeavour. That’s a shame because many of our greatest leaps forward have been built on such seemingly abstract work, and then sometimes years or decades later. Knowledge does have an intrinsic value.