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Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

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Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#81

Post by mehrdadn »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #77

Perhaps it would be useful for reviewers to point out which citations do not contribute to the paper? It really is a tough problem. If someone is toiling along in some niche they have carved out, they and their colleagues may be the only one working in that space. That leads to a lot of cross citation and self citation. That said, if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in…

> if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in paper C you really only need to cite paper B if you're building on the work, not B and A.

Logically I agree with you, but a lot of academics seem to believe differently when it comes to citing other people's work, and if we are to go by that logic (which a lot of people are inevitably forced to do), I don't see why one should treat their own work any differently.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#82

Post by seieste »

19ylram49 wrote: post #67

A particular interest of mine is database systems (and by extension, distributed systems) and I’ve noticed this pattern a fair amount when reading database-related CS papers. It tends to feel like a small circle of researchers citing each other. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t say much about the actual quality of said papers, but it’s a pattern that I’ve definitely noticed. As a result of this, I tend to also make s…

Some fields are very small, and some authors only focus on one small part of a field.

So, high citation count isn't always a direct indicator of quality.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#83

Post by dmix »

gdhbcc wrote: post #71
PeterisP wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks as a metric but it does have some rough correlation in most cases, and I'm not aware of any better easily measurable metric - if you have one in mind, it'd be great to hear. The alternative of having a bureaucrat "simply judge quality" IMHO is even worse, even less objective, and even more prone to being gamed. The main problem is that there is an objective need (or desire?) by various stakeholders to have s…

Why not simply use replication as a measure? Have your studies been replicated? How many other studies have you replicated? Would both help solve the replication crisis, and resolve this problem. Of course then you might have 10 000 studies replicating the same easy to do study... which is why the "score" should be reduced based on how many other times that study has been replicated.

Extreme self replication!

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#84

Post by carapace »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #62
kromem wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a $20 bill and starts to bend over to pick it up. The other economist says "Don't bother - if it were really worth $20, someone else would have picked it up." There's countless numbers of scientists that made great strides working on topics others deemed rediculous. Heck, many of the Nobel prize winners were ridiculed by their colleagues as borderline wack-jobs at…

> Heck, many of the Nobel prize winners were ridiculed by their colleagues as borderline wack-jobs at the time they were working on their research. Even after winning the prize, some still were with their later work (Crick's search for consciousness comes to mind, and why it would be so worthless a search does not). Do you have any good examples of being considered wack-jobs before their winning?

Semmelweis. He never received the Nobel prize, but I think he counts towards the point.

> Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that hand-washing with a solution of chlorinated lime reduced the incidence of fatal childbed fever tenfold in maternity institutions. However, the reaction of his contemporaries was not positive; his subsequent mental disintegration led to him being confined to an insane asylum, where he died in 1865.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz...

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#85

Post by wpietri »

PeterisP wrote: post #57
hannob wrote: post #21

The core problem here is that universities think that citation statistics are a useful metric to evaluate the quality of the work of a scientist. There's plenty of evidence that this is not the case or that even the reverse may be the case [1], but this idea refuses to die. [1]

It sucks as a metric but it does have some rough correlation in most cases, and I'm not aware of any better easily measurable metric - if you have one in mind, it'd be great to hear. The alternative of having a bureaucrat "simply judge quality" IMHO is even worse, even less objective, and even more prone to being gamed. The main problem is that there is an objective need (or desire?) by various stakeholders to have s…

I think a problem here is Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." [1] And it seems like there's an element of the streetlight effect [2], too; sometimes a bad metric really is worse than no metric.

Also, I really question your notion that people outside a field should be able to evaluate the quality of someone's work, especially in academia, where the whole point is to be well ahead of what most people can understand. That theory seems like part of managerialism [3], which I'll grant is the dominant paradigm in the western corporate world.

I understand why a managerialist class would like to set themselves up as the well-paid judges of everybody else. But I'm not seeing why anybody would willingly submit themselves to that. It's a commonplace here on HN that we avoid letting managers make technical decisions, however fancy their MBA, because they're fundamentally not competent to do it. That seems much more important for people doing cutting-edge research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#86

Post by newacctjhro »

gdhbcc wrote: post #71
PeterisP wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks as a metric but it does have some rough correlation in most cases, and I'm not aware of any better easily measurable metric - if you have one in mind, it'd be great to hear. The alternative of having a bureaucrat "simply judge quality" IMHO is even worse, even less objective, and even more prone to being gamed. The main problem is that there is an objective need (or desire?) by various stakeholders to have s…

Why not simply use replication as a measure? Have your studies been replicated? How many other studies have you replicated? Would both help solve the replication crisis, and resolve this problem. Of course then you might have 10 000 studies replicating the same easy to do study... which is why the "score" should be reduced based on how many other times that study has been replicated.

This might work for hard sciences, but not for mathematics.

Or, I dunno, paleontology or sociology or other stuff.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#87

Post by nashashmi »

agdpf wrote: post #22
jedberg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case you have to ask yourself, are you so brilliant that you’ve found an important topic that no one has considered yet, or have all the brilliant people already figured out that topic isn’t worthy of study? It’s the same with the startup world. If you’re the only one doing a thing, are you brilliant or foolish?

>In which case you have to ask yourself, are you so brilliant that you’ve found an important topic that no one has considered yet, or have all the brilliant people already figured out that topic isn’t worthy of study? Imagine how many inventions we would have missed if all inventors had shared your mindset.

He is not talking of a mindset. He is talking about making a reflection.

If you are the only one doing the work, why is it worth doing?

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#88

Post by nashashmi »

reallydude wrote: post #55
jedberg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ve misinterpreted what I said. I’m not suggesting everyone is a fool, quite the opposite. It’s just an important question to ask yourself.

The purpose of PHDs are to move human knowledge forward. You have to do an analysis of something that, in all likelihood, nobody has done before (or not enough to be considered settled).

But then your analysis has to be challenged as well. And the challenges should be published. Success or fail.

If you live in your own bubble the needle doesn't move forward.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#89

Post by bifrost »

lonelappde wrote: post #42
bifrost wrote: post #4

I found this situation regularly when going down the rabbithole of the anti-vaxx or anti-5g people. One "scientist" makes a highly dubious claim, thousands of nutjobs cite this one scientist, "scientist" then goes on to cite articles that cites their work. I'm basically waiting to find Alex Jones cited in a serious article at this point.

This is called citogenesis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesi...

Thats pretty good :) It sounds better than incition or whatever word I might make up on the fly.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#90

Post by nashashmi »

std_throwaway wrote: post #33
jedberg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case you have to ask yourself, are you so brilliant that you’ve found an important topic that no one has considered yet, or have all the brilliant people already figured out that topic isn’t worthy of study? It’s the same with the startup world. If you’re the only one doing a thing, are you brilliant or foolish?

Most scientists work on topics that are quite niche. Most of those topics lead to nothing. A lot of good research took years to ripen enough to be of actual value. A lot of popular topics started out in a niche. Most of mathematics took dozens of years to fully come to fruitition. Can you decide beforehand which one will be the next big thing? Today, most scientists go for the popular topics and whatever is on the go…

So to answer the question, you are so brilliant no one else has stumbled on this question
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