[NoMoreNicksLeft]

All of this is the result of scaling issues. For most of the history of science, it was a endeavor pursued by very few people. Then we started sending everyone to university, eviscerated our economies, and expanded the research workforce a thousandfold. More maybe.

There is a dearth of rewarding research to pursue, even less grant money, and in such a crowded ingroup people become hyper-competitive at status-seeking activities. Now we have entire catalogs of journals that are pretty much just publication mills. There are entire continents whose papers can't be trusted to be anything but outright fabrications. No meaningful reform is possible.

[sfpotter]

There's tons of very interesting and rewarding research to pursue. It's hard to see the forest for the trees because so much of the research pursued currently is neither interesting nor rewarding. You have to be brave, creative, and independently minded in order to realize that this research is just around the corner. The current academic system doesn't select for people with these traits (rather, it selects for people who are good at taking tests and following rules).

[searine]

I don't think it is that pessimistic.

Yes there are low-quality papers out there but I'd rather have 100 low-quality papers if it gives us 1 truly insightful piece of research. Any expert worth their salt can read a paper and judge its veracity very quickly, and it is those high-quality papers that get cited.

Even when one of those high-quality publications gets shown to be false, it moves the field forward. Real science is incremental and slow.