Overflow in science and its implications for trust

To explore increasing concerns about scientific misconduct and data irreproducibility in some areas of science, we interviewed a number of senior biomedical researchers. These interviews revealed a perceived decline in trust in the scientific enterprise, in large part because the quantity of new data exceeds the field's ability to process it appropriately. This phenomenon-which is termed 'overflow' in social science-has important implications for the integrity of modern biomedical science.