A lot of people every days products a lot of research and maybe useless for society, but which scale can evaluate the research is useful for society.
No, there are no useless research dear @Emad. Have you seen my previous post about failures in research.
I will bring some more stories.
Researchers don’t dream of negative results, but experiments and trials that don’t go as expected are crucial for moving science forward...
So often, there is wisdom contained within statistically non-significant or negative studies. These are not failures, but rather insights upon which we can build future studies...
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/why-negative-results-are-worthy-of-publication
Hello Vahid Abdolvahab,
Notably, measuring the benefits of university-oriented research has increasingly become important in recent years. It seems that the swing of the pendulum is actually following a new direction addressing the extent to which research outcomes contribute to the advancement of scientific-scholarly knowledge in general and their influences on sociocultural and socioeconomic aspects of the society in particular.The motive behind such change is nothing but the growing public concern about value for money.For measuring the impact of research on various social aspects is an emerging methodology and it is identified based on carefully chosen indicators such as end-user opinions, media visibility, financial support by non‐academic institutions, cooperation with the public and private sectors, generating entrepreneurship, etc.
Best regards,
R. Biria
Research which may not be economical or has societal benefits may be useless today. However, the research may be potentially useful at a later date.
The basic purpose of conducting a research is to solve a problem, or to reach a new result. In either case, it will provide a service to the community, but if the research does not solve a problem , in my opinion is a waste of time, effort and money.
Whether scientists like it or not, the economic and societal impact of their research is an increasingly important factor in attracting public funding and support.
As research becomes more international, the use of metrics to measure the economic and societal impact of science has gained in importance...
Since the onset of the global economic crisis and the subsequent pressure placed on public finances, there have been growing calls for science to show its return on investment — given that much of the research enterprise is directly or indirectly funded from the public purse. At the same time, questions have been raised about the social and economic good that science is contributing to society. As a consequence, the use of metric methodologies which measure the economic and societal impact of research and scholarship has increasingly gained in importance...
https://www.elsevier.com/connect/impact-of-science-the-need-to-measure
A research can never be useless. I totally agree with the comment of @Emad Sir.
I am in Agriculture field. Once in a while, some crops will encounter some disease infection and lose their yield for the year. The loss of yield means the loss of farmers' income. To research a way to fight the disease and restore the crop yield is considered a useful research for the community.
I want researchers to share everything from start to finish. Why? Because we need them to. Their failures, if seen, could stop another researcher from making the same mistakes. What’s more, knowing what doesn’t work will help researchers—or computers, in the future—deduce what might work, and in turn, speed up scientific progress.
This scientific progress is critical if we are going to tackle global challenges; preventing pandemics and finding sustainable energy sources that will fuel growing societies. However, if other fields are any indication, getting to a point where sharing failed scientific results is commonplace will be hard and take time. It will be worth it though, because the benefits are immense...
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/why-scientists-must-share-their-failures
I agree with you @ dear Ljubomir Jacić. It will be useful that both 'positive' and 'negative' results are revealed to the scientists, so the new researchers will not make the same mistakes (or take the same wrong approach for the similar experiments) again. Nowadays, more and more journals are publishing 'negative' results. Such as this paper: "No evidence for genome editing in mouse zygotes and HEK293T human cell line using the DNA-guided Natronobacterium gregoryi Argonaute (NgAgo)."
But the 'negative' results to show should not come from an obvious stupid mistake.
Which scale can evaluate the research is useful for society?
There are two types of researches, one is 'basic' or fundmental research, and the other one is for 'application'. The fundamental research might not contribute to the society right away, but it will be very important for the researchers in the field. For example, research to study the basic mechanisms of plant photosynthesis.
No, there are no useless research dear @Emad. Have you seen my previous post about failures in research.
I will bring some more stories.
Researchers don’t dream of negative results, but experiments and trials that don’t go as expected are crucial for moving science forward...
So often, there is wisdom contained within statistically non-significant or negative studies. These are not failures, but rather insights upon which we can build future studies...
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/why-negative-results-are-worthy-of-publication
Clearly there are useful research, useful now or certainly will be in the future: research that are done to cure diseases and elongate life, research that are done to modify or create new products of technology to overcome challenges of nature including our own for efficiency, products that enable us to see distant or microscopic object to know their behaviors, process data and give results so that we make helpful decisions, augment efficiency of communications in air, land, ocean or electronics, and researches that are used to augment existing practical knowledge.
In general researches that intend to transform the civilization of man to a better state in time. There are research works whose immediate use are not yet apparent, such as mathematics, but by virtue of the fact that they are built on truth of logic and reasoning will be vital for increasing the capacity of science for solving unsolved problems. .
A research is useless to society only when it is a scum, that has no scientific premise, not used scientific procedures and with a result that is false. However, true failure in research is not useless but a catapult to true success.
A null result is not a “failure”! An excellent article!
Sometimes negative results are unexpected, but contribute to advances in science. Sometimes they’re by design, with experiments created not to produce results in the traditional sense, but to fine-tune methods and processes for the future...
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/a-null-result-is-not-a-failure
No ethics No science. There are priorities in human societies and these priorities are important to drive scientific progress. There are not priorities in the mind of a scientist and there is not useless research. The problem in our modern societies is that money and profit drive scienific advance, so, we are forced to talk for "useless science" as this research does not fulifill human needs (treat diseases, food, etc).
Dear Prof. Ljubomir Jacić ,
Well noticed, really I completely agree with all your valuable posts.
Hope you nice night.
Emad
Useful research solves the problems of mankind by offering potent remedies and innovating new ways of addressing the diverse challenges of the world. On the other hand, useless research digs the same hole that has been dug already (solves problems that have been solved perfectly by other researchers) and tries to bring light to an already well lit area (we already have those new forms of knowledge or enlightenment via some earlier research works). Such research just drains resources such as time and money while contributing to piling of copy papers that finally become 'rubbish', causing unnecessary traffic in search engines.
Thanks
Dickson Adom
only time can be an accurate measure of useful and useless research in society...
Failure moves research forward!
How one researcher learned to embrace negative results?
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/failure-moves-research-forward
Hi,
On its face value, one could assume that research that is applied is more useful to society than basic, theoretical research, but the fact is that theoretical research is often cited in patents that are part of applied research, so, the various types of research are interconnected , and all are important for society, now or in the future.
'Failure' is not more than a human interpretation?
'Negative results' is not more than an human interpretation?
Each result is 'true', otherwise it would not have been physically expressed?
dr-monsrs.net/2017/04/03/on-corruption-in-the-peer-review-process-does-it-matter/
“ These data are just amazing, but I wonder how she got them?”
“It won’t matter if I ignore this error, because no-one will notice and nobody will get hurt”.
“He’s so very famous! How can I dare to criticize his experiments?”
“Finally, I can get back at that bastard who wants to kill me!”
What stimulates corruption in modern science?
The most useless Science is the corrupted Science, see big Institutions .....
We need to name them IT IS IMPORTANT.
Despite there are growing pressures for researches/works to demonstrate usefulness, whereas judgments of usefulness appear to have been largely based on economic values/pleasing powerful stakeholders/attracting resources (namely: funds, donations, sponsors, and/or students, etc.), Learmonth et al (2012) reminded that what counts as useful can be affected by the changing fads and ideologies, as well as the cultural and technological changes.
More specifically, what is regarded as useless may sometimes/someday turn out to be useful, an example being Hardy’s (1940) works, which were once considered as useless (unprofitable), however, they have later become the key elements in developing computer (p. 36). Ironically (and interestingly), the collaterised Debt Obligations (CDOs) that built upon Li’s (2000) Gaussian copula model, where its usefulness adversely turned CDOs to become a disaster (p. 39).
In regard to the usefulness/uselessness debate/query, we may further think by asking ourselves: useful for whom?, and whose interest do we want to be useful to? (pp. 40-42).
- Learmonth, M., Lockett, A. and Dowd, K. (2012). Promoting scholarship that matters: the uselessness of useful research and the usefulness of useless research. British Journal of Management, 23, 1, pp. 35-44.
Papers with manipulated data and fabricate results can lead other researches to perform useless researches. Especially, when those papers are published on top journals. Because the 'positive' results claimed in the papers will never be reproduced.
Even though those papers are retracted, many people would still use it and cite it. Retraction Watch released a list of the retracted research papers with the most citations, and many of the citations came AFTER those papers were pulled. [ see attachment, from: https://qz.com/583497/researchers-keep-citing-these-retracted-papers/ ]
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685008/
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