This whole stage and the incentives that it is built on has its own imbalances, and despite its history that spans a few centuries, it continues to be a work in progress. But off late, I’ve been particularly fixated on that one word: novelty. In some ways, it is a simple word that asks a straightforward question: ‘So, what’s new?’. And yet, it forms the subjective core of how science operates and is disseminated.

It is the same subjectivity which sometimes leads to polar opposite takes from independent reviewers; while someone might find a theory or result unique, others may scoff at its plainness. The pursuit of virtuous novelty can also influence the scientific vocabulary where embellishing certain aspects of the research to inflate the claims can tip the scale. For instance, the use of positive adjectives (‘novel’, ‘innovative’, ‘amazing’, etc.) in the titles and abstracts from a set of surveyed papers showed a steep increase between 1974 and 2014. And lastly, an easy way to seek out novelty is to invent it; to tie up elements of one’s own research with a currently trendy related topic. And as someone within this system, the thought does cross my mind every time we try our hand at some new experimental concepts: does it follow some real scientific merit or is it merely to check the novelty box?

But the greatest detriment of scientific novelty is the incentives it creates, for it motivates researchers to find new and dazzling ways of doing things instead of validating existing theories and methods which might have caught some rust. That same culture also looks down upon so-called ‘incremental’ work which involves making small uncool steps forward while checking and re-checking the bland progress made in between. Disincentivizing all these elements eventually leads to a cycle of broad, yet shallow claims and their irreproducibility in subsequent research, only to spur more broad claims.

But as the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman once said: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.”