Jay Bhattacharya on rewarding novelty while neglecting replication: warns against

Bhattacharya warns against a scientific reward system that celebrates novelty while neglecting replication. In his September 2026 Science editorial launching R3PEATS, as covered by Inside Higher Ed, he argued that the attention imbalance toward new discoveries lets “substantial time, talent, and resources… be consumed chasing findings that may not hold up.” His reasoning is that careers, journals, and funders all reward the next exciting result while ignoring confirmation work, creating an incentive structure that tolerates — and amplifies — unreliable findings. The R3PEATS program’s roughly $174 million over five years is his proposed counterweight: paying for the replication the incentive system would not fund on its own.

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