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A theme at this year's World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting was the perceived need to "accelerate breakthroughs in research and technology." Some of this discussion was motivated by the climate emergency, some by the opportunities and challenges presented by generative artificial intelligence. Yet in various conversations, it seemed to be taken for granted that to address the world's problems, scientific research needs to move faster.

The WEF meeting took place just two weeks after Harvard University President Claudine Gay stepped down after complaints were made about her political science scholarship. Gay's troubles came after Stanford University President Marc Tessier Lavigne stepped down, after an internal investigation concluded that his neuroscience research had "multiple problems" and "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor." Although it may be impossible to determine just how widespread such problems really are, it's hard to imagine that the phenomenon of high-profile scholars correcting and withdrawing papers has not had a negative impact on public trust in science and perhaps in experts broadly.

In recent years we've seen important papers withdrawn because of questionable data or methods. In one interesting case, Frances H. Arnold, who shared the 2018Nobel Prize in Chemistry, voluntarily withdrew a paper when her lab was unable to reproduce her results - but after the paper had been published. In an open apology, she stated that she was "a bit busy" when the paper was submitted and "did not do my job well." Arnold's honesty is admirable, but it raises a question: Are scholars at highly competitive places such as Harvard and Standford rushing to publishing rather than taking the time to do their work right?

It's impossible to answer this question scientifically because there's no scientific definition of what constitutes "rushing". But there's little doubt that we live in a culture where academics at leading universities are under enormous pressure to produce results - and a lot of them - quickly. However, nearly a century passed between biochemist Friedrich Miescher's identification of the DNA molecule and suggestion that it might be involved in inheritance (遗传) and the clarification of its double-helix (双螺旋) structure in the 1950s. And it took just about half a century for geologists and geophysicists to accept Alfred Wegener's idea of continental drift (漂移).

There's plenty of circumstantial evidence that scientists and other scholars are pushing results out far faster than they used to. One recent study put the number at more than seven million a year, compared with fewer than a million as recently as 1980. Another study found 265 academic authors - two thirds of whom were in the medical and life sciences - published a paper every five days on average. The numbers suggest that the research world has prioritized quantity over quality. Researchers may need to slow down - not speed up - if we are to produce knowledge worthy of trust.