TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

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52 episodes
2025 to 2026
Median: 53 minutes
Collection: Science

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast examines how internet-era incentives, platforms, and emerging technologies are reshaping science, medicine, and scholarly publishing. Hosted by Kent Anderson and Joy Moore in conjunction with their book project on internet disruption, it mixes commentary on current events with discussions of how scientific claims circulate, how trust is established, and how that trust can be exploited.

Across the episodes, a recurring focus is the infrastructure of credibility in research: peer review, editorial judgment, identifiers like DOIs, and quantitative indicators such as the Journal Impact Factor and altmetrics. The hosts argue that long-standing signals meant to help readers navigate scholarship are being stressed by changes in publishing volume, open-access business models, preprints, special-issue proliferation, and the use of generative AI—conditions that can enable paper mills, manipulated citations, low-quality “AI slop,” and other forms of gaming. Related to this is a sustained interest in governance and accountability: who functions as the “middle” in information markets, what rules apply to platforms, and how advertising and attention-driven models can conflict with scientific aims.

Another prominent thread is the interaction between science and political or economic power. Episodes frequently touch on public health controversies and science policy disputes, including vaccine-related misinformation, attempts to pressure journals, and the role of private wealth, philanthropy, and technology leaders in shaping research priorities and communication channels.

Interviews with editors, librarians, historians, technologists, and scholars broaden the lens to include library technology and metadata, academic labor, the sociology of truth and norms, and critiques of AI hype. Many episodes also include lighter “discoveries of the week,” but the overall emphasis remains on how scientific knowledge is produced, packaged, and contested in the platform age.