Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by dpark » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #85

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…

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 we…

> the whole point is to be well ahead of what most people can understand

That’s not the case at all. Being at the leading edge of research should mean that you are creating new knowledge. That doesn’t imply that people cannot understand it. This expectation that laypeople cannot possibly understand science is one of the reasons so many papers are written so densely and obtusely. “They” can’t understand it anyway, right?

Feynman said if he couldn’t explain it to freshmen he didn’t understand it himself.

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

#112

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

IggleSniggle wrote: post #64

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…

Yes, bizarrely, reputation / trust is still the primary foundation of academia from a pragmatic perspective, even though it is the antithesis of science. At least some disciplines can have replication studies cross-culturally. It’s a hard problem to solve; knowledge is inherently a social/shared experience.

Trust is a curious one, it's not the antithesis of science, indeed it's required for science to actually work rather than simply be an idea.

You trust in people, in consistency of physical laws, in coherency of your own mind, in constancy of temporal flow, in so many things because - as the Pyrrhonist refrains - nothing is certain, not even this.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 11:44 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

petschge wrote: post #96

coldtea wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err, isn't PageRank almost the same as "citations"?

No, because it counts citations from influential papers with a higher weight.

Isn't that how is done in academic circles? Maybe not quantatively but qualitatively surely tenure boards or hiring boards or student applicants notice such things.

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

#115

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #20

std_throwaway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work in a very narrow field of science you're basically on your own and have to cite yourself because there's nobody else to cite.

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?

Or you just happen to be there for the good bit?

It seems like PhD candidates work on peripheral elements of their sponsor/tutor/professor's work, of that professor at some point is going to make a significant step then one of those PhDs will be along for the ride; not necessarily the genius one.

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

#116

Post by throwawaywego » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 11:58 PM UTC

The opposite of extreme self-citing is self-plagiarism (either out of ignorance, to avoid extreme self-citing on ground-breaking research, or with malicious intent: passing the same paper to multiple journals as a new result).

> The rate of duplication in the rest of the biomedical literature has been estimated to be between 10% to 20% (Jefferson, 1998), though one review of the literature suggests the more conservative figure of approximately 10% (Steneck, 2000). https://ori.hhs.gov/plagiarism-13

If work by another author was enough to inspire you and add a reference, then your own previous work should certainly qualify, if it added inspiration to the current paper. Self-citing provides a "paper trail" for the reader when they want to investigate a claim or proof further.

(Like PageRank, it is very possible to discount internal PR/links under external links, and when you also take into account the authority of the referencer, you avoid scientists accumulating references from non-peer reviewed Arxiv publications).

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

#117

Post by nashashmi » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 12:03 AM UTC

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #102

nashashmi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, the answer is that there is a limited number of scientists and a limitless number of research directions. This doesn't have to be correlated with brilliance. In fact, it can be easier to research some of the less popular paths because there is less competition and more low-hanging fruits.

Fine. The more accurate word would be "advanced" instead of brilliant.

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

#118

Post by tony » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

If you narrow yourself to a specific niche well enough, you'll see the same names in citations. To be fair, the areas I dig into don't feel nearly as competitive as say, physics, which I couldn't make heads or tails of.

The whole reason the internet and wikis took off is we were very liberal in how we linked. If we disallowed inbound citations, wouldn't it be a lot harder to backtrack and grasp contextual underpinnings?

Anecdote: In the field of adult attachment theory love there are a few prominent scholars that cite each other: Shaver, Hazan, Mikulincer. They do papers citing their own work and each other [1]. There's also a book by Mikulincer highlights Shaver's upbringing with his parents, his past as a hippy, etc. They're delivering very nice content, and they cite others outside their ("circle"?)

Are there potentially scholars in the field with valuable contributions that go unnoticed? Possibly. It doesn't make self-citations in their papers any less helpful. Also I worry that regulating citations through some system may affect the quality of content and fix something that's not broken.

Which brings me to another issue, aren't we supposed to be helping each other?

[1] Example: http://adultattachmentlab.human.cornell.edu/HazanShaver1990....

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

#119

Post by mathgenius » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #2

Given that pagerank had its origins in citations it should not be surprising to find link farms and other spam in scientific publications.

This is not pagerank. But they really should use pagerank in this nature article because (very likely) it will blow away this self-citation problem. People should be able to self-cite as much as they want. Not using pagerank is the problem.

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

#120

Post by n1231231231234 » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 12:07 AM UTC

not2b wrote: post #106

Self-citation is appropriate for a new paper that builds on the results of a previous paper. But in evaluating how influential a researcher is, it makes sense to exclude self-citation, while being careful to avoid any implication that self-citation is wrong.

when self-citation is OK and when it is not OK should be part of one's academic training/phd training.

PLOS gives reasonable citation guidelines, and in this context their Rule 5 is particular relevant: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...