Orchestrating Relevance – Critique of a Questionable Trait of Modern Science Communication

This essay critically analyzes the widespread phenomenon of claiming relevance when reporting original research. Specific examples from an area of method development in organofluorine chemistry demonstrate that the pursuit of worthiness of the corresponding research is mainly justified by putting fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Antonio Togni
Format: Article
Language:deu
Published: Swiss Chemical Society 2024-09-01
Series:CHIMIA
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/view/7367
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Summary:This essay critically analyzes the widespread phenomenon of claiming relevance when reporting original research. Specific examples from an area of method development in organofluorine chemistry demonstrate that the pursuit of worthiness of the corresponding research is mainly justified by putting forward a broad general industrial context that could potentially benefit in form of applications. However, it is deliberately ignored that such applications are in the vast majority of cases highly improbable or objectively unrealistic. Notwithstanding that scientists are nowadays often explicitly forced to orchestrate relevance, be it by researchfinancing institutions and/or journals’ reviewers, it is argued that this is, from the point of view of research ethics at least, problematic.
ISSN:0009-4293
2673-2424