To be fair to some researchers in certain specializations, there may only be a handful of scientists publishing on the topic. Self-Citation proceeds naturally from such circumstances.
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
#152For those who wonder why there are climate-change deniers who won't listen to "the science" this article is for you. The sad and honest fact is, science has become a spin-factory in a way mainstream media has. Yes, in theory, the scientic method / process is a wonderful standard. Unfortunately, once it's exposed to egos and profits it becomes somethings else far less worth of praise and honor. I'm not doing a take do…
Says ChiefAlchemist? Twas Newton's chief failing, alchemy.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#153Earlier 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…
I wonder about the idea where we measure a metric, and cut off the tails of the distribution. This presumes we have a regular means of sampling the metric to lend a time profile of it.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, I'll try to clarify what exactly I mean by "people outside a field should be able to evaluate the quality of someone's work" - especially because, as I said regarding peer review, we generally consider that it's impossible to do so directly . It's about the question of resource allocation. Pretty much every subfield of academia is a net consumer of resources, i.e. someone outside of that subfield is funneling r…
Just to be clear, I understood what you were saying before. I just disagree. I think the right approach is to select trusted experts and let them make the decisions about their fields. Again, since this is a tech community, let me use that for an analogy. It's a classic problem for non-technical founders to evaluate their technical hires. They aren't qualified. The right solution is not to find some gameable metric o…
It seems like "Selecting trusted experts" alone would defer more to human subjectivity and biases than would be necessary if objective measures were utilized as much as possible.
Existing community/expertise based moderation and reputation systems might not be directly transferable or adequate. But it shows there are new ways to think about more decentralized measures of reputation that are new to this century and haven't been tried. New ways that may be preferable to a small group of kingmakers.
I think the biggest problem is leadership and cooperation of community to try something different. It's not just that there is no person who can mandate these things, it's that multiple constituencies have widely diverging interests, i.e. authors, universities, corporations, journals.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#155Now the question we all want to have answered: what's the database engine?
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#156This is a news? I thought the Publish or Perish idiom made it obvious.
2 weeks of effort goes into doing something and you spend 2 months of writing a paper of the slightest of the result. Many of these papers introduce an infinitesimal increment to knowledge, at best and you can tell how long would it have taken to get it working. And this is Numerical Mathematics. There are clans of Mathematicians who just go around citing each other. And a quality paper comes around every 5 years or so.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pagerank is referring to the graph algorithm known as pagerank, not anything provided specifically by Google.
"PageRank" is a Google trademark, and also the subject of a patent belonging to Stanford University and licensed exclusively to Google.
That patent expired.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#158As an indication that this is a hard problem to solve, remember that these papers have usually gone through peer review anonymised. They cite "Smith & Jones 1982", but it might not be obvious from the writing that they are either Smith or Jones.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#159As an indication that this is a hard problem to solve, remember that these papers have usually gone through peer review anonymised. They cite "Smith & Jones 1982", but it might not be obvious from the writing that they are either Smith or Jones.
I completely agree with this. Sometimes you have to look closer than people often do to spot self-citation.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#160Like a Las Vegas show rated #1 by the casino owned magazine. They were voted #1, however.