Dr Alecia Carter
behavioural ecologist, research integrity advocate, baboon enthusiast
My projects
My current research revolves around three themes:
Information use
How animals access and use information
Animals can get information in two ways: either by sampling their environment themselves, i.e. personal information, or by watching other individuals, i.e. social information. I investigate whether, how and why individuals differ in their preferences for using personal and social information.
Social networks
How networks dictate information flow
The social network—the patterning of social interactions among individuals—may be important for individuals’ access to information. I investigate how information transmits through social networks.
Thanatology
How primates respond to death
Every living animal dies. Yet we know next to nothing about how animals respond to the deaths of others, even in our closest living relatives, the non-human primates. I investigate within- and between-species variation in primates' responses to the deaths of others. Find out more here.
Ethics in academia
The publish or perish problem
In my time in academia thus far, I have become increasingly disillusioned with the focus on where one publishes over what one has found. I have resolved to make a few small changes to my professional behaviour to combat this effect.
Competition in academia, epitomised by the pervasive and harmful aphorism “publish or perish”, affects researcher behaviour: it increases productivity in terms of publication output, but also leads to biases in the scientific literature. This is because academics are not being assessed on whether their research leads to scientific truth, but on their putative ‘impact’. Unfortunately, this ‘impact’ is measured by various proxies that ostensibly reflect the importance of academics’ contributions to the scientific literature, but which are fundamentally flawed. As long as academics are rewarded for impact rather than integrity, selection in academia has and will continue to result in: biases in the academic literature; the loss of creativity in approaching research questions; irreproducibility of results and over-inflation of effect sizes; wasted research funds; weakening of the public trust in science; the attrition of women in academia; low levels of psychological health in academics and, in extreme cases, public and/or personal harm.
Consequently, the selective environment for academics has to change for researchers’ behaviour to change. This requires a collective, cultural shift in academics’, funders’, and governments’ research values and practices. Solutions have been proposed by many people but few have been implemented collectively by academics. The question thus remains: Why? In an effort to combat these problems, and change at least one researcher’s behaviour—mine—I have resolved to make the following small changes to my behaviour.
Reviewing ethics
Sign reviews, be constructive
Sign my reviews. Signing my reviews makes me culpable and thus thorough and constructive. I have been signing for a few years now, and I must admit that there have been many times where I've made a comment to the authors and then had to take the time to check whether the comment was justified because I sign. This includes little checks, such as going back to a manuscript's statistical analyses section to double check co-variates, to bigger 'checks', such as going back to the literature to find and cite the correct reference for an assertion I've made. My one worry with signing is the possibility that authors for whom I've given a favourable review will feel obliged to be favourable to my submitted manuscripts, should they be asked to review one. However, I feel the benefit of transparency outweighs this possible cost.
Publishing ethics
Boycott 'luxury' and for-profit journals, publish open access
Carefully choosing where to publish. There are two issues here. The first has to do with the influence that publishing in 'luxury' journals, including Science, Cell and Nature, has on academics' careers and the documented behavioural changes academics have made to publish in them. As I have listed these above, I won't reiterate the points here. But I would urge others to consider what makes good science: should one value the rigorousness and integrity of the scientific process behind a finding, or the p-value at the end of that process and the tidiness of the 'story'?
I realise that I am hurting my funding and career prospects by relying on others to read my work to assess its quality themselves. (This is even more apparent to me after a recent encounter with a senior academic who told me he would not read my work to know whether it is insightful, he would rely on the journal's impact factor to tell him that.) However, as there is overwhelming evidence that valuing these journals is misplaced, I will attempt to do great science and have a successful career (if more fraught with disappointment) without them.
The second issue has to do with publishers making prodigious profits from publishing publicly- and charity-funded research. It does seem unethical to drain funding away from science to private companies. Coupled with this is a lack of transparency and accessibility when publishing behind a paywall. I will thus publish as much as possible in open access journals. (For the record, paying for gold open access in paywalled journals deals with only the access half of this battle: the company still makes a profit from funds that could better be spent on more research.) However, I will publish in society journals such as Animal Behaviour, as membership to these societies is relatively low, and the benefits include journal access. Finally, I will continue to uphold my end of the Cost of Knowledge petition.
