Tatsuma Wada: Between Criticism and Pursuit

In my field of economics, there has been much discussion recently about the increasing page counts of papers submitted to international peer-reviewed journals. This was even featured in a Wall Street Journal headline on July 23rd, which began with "Economists Can't Write Economically." As the article notes, ideas that could actually be summarized in a few pages end up becoming papers of about 50 pages. One reason for this is that, to avoid rejection during the rigorous peer-review process, authors preemptively address potential criticisms from reviewers from various angles within the paper. Of course, the idea that a good paper is one with a rigorous analysis that can withstand criticism is persuasive, and it is highly unlikely that a paper with obvious errors would pass peer review in a famous specialized journal.

For this reason, I also take great care regarding the reproducibility of estimations and simulations in my research. However, some papers have pointed out that many research results among those published in specialized journals cannot be reproduced.

Consequently, people outside the research community sometimes suspect that "fraud for the sake of prestige or obtaining research funds is rampant among researchers." Therefore, various measures have been taken in recent years to prevent research misconduct. However, what is important here is the difference between intentional falsification/fabrication and unintentional errors that are not immediately obvious, and the difference between these two is not always easy to understand. The former is a crime in research, but what is the latter?

In the 1980s and 90s in the United States, investigations into research misconduct involved Congress and prosecutors. In the midst of this, Robert E. Pollack, a professor at Columbia University, wrote a contribution to the New York Times stating, "Published error is at the heart of any real science." This likely means that if one is solely preoccupied with not making mistakes, one can only produce rehashes of already known facts, like a certified textbook. While a researcher should conduct research with the mindset that their work must withstand criticism, from the perspective of the original purpose of research—the pursuit of new things—errors are, in a sense, natural. I tell myself to think big in my research.