A lot of researchers build upon their previous work, and the work of their peers. I don't see how researchers can avoid citing their old work in this case.
Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
171–180 of 215 posts
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a hardcore postmodern leftist? You don’t believe in objective truth but make claims as if it exists?
Well you clearly don’t actually know what postmodernism is, so mind your criticism until you read a book.
Please stay courteous and on topic. Nobody cares about you being a "hardcore postmodern leftist" ...
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#173PageRank was precisely invented to solve this issue. I have never understood why Google Scholar itself took stance not to even compute it and stick to h-index. Google Scholar is a defacto standard for looking up researchers and whatever metric they adopt would be adopted by the rest of the world.
It's frustrating to see science emasculating itself and rely on commercial, even monopolistic services when there is no lack of research in document search and comprehension. Ten or fifteen years ago there was citeseer for tracking citations. It was a messy Perl program/site to scan through mostly TeX files for metadata and references, yet it worked relatively well, and was held reasonably up-to-date. Then they rewrote it into CiteseerX, such that it became useless. It never recovered.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you clearly don’t actually know what postmodernism is, so mind your criticism until you read a book.
Please stay courteous and on topic. Nobody cares about you being a "hardcore postmodern leftist" ...
I never claimed to be one. My comment is directly relevant to the parent, so is on topic. Also, good job demonstrating courtesy with your dismissive tone.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#175As someone who now works in astronomy, I'm not at all surprised at the high self-citation rate for the field. It is true that a lot of papers are published by large consortiums. For example, at LSST (where I work), if you have been working on the project for 2 years, you are considered a "builder" and added as an author to all major project wide papers. Those papers, which tend to be long and full of great stuff, are…
This probably varies by field, but the "large project" thing can be gamed too. So, for example, in biomedicine you often have lots of people on a paper who might only read a draft, make some trivial suggestions, and then be added as an author. As a result, there's this pressure for large groups to form, where everyone is added and everyone can cite each other. This doesn't mean the projects are bad, but it does lead…
> Science gets done but the rewards seem to filter preferentially to those who are able to game the system, and the system exists out of a need to make one's self look as productive as possible
This is largely due to the current model of science funding, and not just in the US. Here in Germany, many involved in public (i.e. at an university, not inhouse r&d at a company) science only get 1-year-limited chain contracts with no real security and low pay, as many grants and funds are also available only in the same time frame which means it's a constant hustle for funding, especially at third parties.
IMO there is only one way to solve this problem: politics have to irrevocably allocate fixed chunks of money for public scientifical investment for long terms (think 10 or 20 years) to give the scientists and universities actual security in their planning and staffing. This would also solve the problem that e.g. NASA has with each President reversing course. No wonder that the last Moon visit was decades ago when the priorities get completely turned over every 4-8 years.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#176You need a source of trust in these systems. Journals used to have that role. They had high standards that were upheld by editors selecting only worthy publications. Today it seems that many journals aren't as trustworthy as they seemed to be in the past. It's also easier to spam the journals with your publication and to bullshit your way into publication. The incentives to publish a lot are also way higher now that…
Citations should primarily serve to mention relevant work, which often includes authors' earlier works.
The problem really is the abuse of citation metrics and journal brand names (and especially journal-based metrics) as a means of evaluating researchers. What we really need is a different method of evaluating researchers that does not rely on where they publish or what they cite.
(But I would say that, given that I work on one such a system.)
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#177Number of citations in academia == lines of code as a metrics for a software developer?
More like Github stars
I think lines of code is a better metaphor, because the number of lines of code is a necessary artefact of writing code, but easy to game without actually improving quality once they become a measure of evaluation.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#178Regrettable that the article begins by outing a prof from an unheard of university in India, who probably publishes in low repute journals and conference. Ideally the citing malfeasance score should be weighted based on journal and conference reputation.
And how do you measure journal and conference reputation? Conventional measures there also lean on citations, and journals have been known to do quite a bit of manipulation to get those scores up.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#179PageRank was precisely invented to solve this issue. I have never understood why Google Scholar itself took stance not to even compute it and stick to h-index. Google Scholar is a defacto standard for looking up researchers and whatever metric they adopt would be adopted by the rest of the world.
Doesn't PageRank have the exact same problem of manipulation, where people link to other sites in order to prop those sites up, just like people cite articles to prop them (or their authors) up?
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#180Earlier 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…
This raises a simple issue: how would the non-experts in an area choose the most appropriate set of experts? In this case it would correspond to funding agencies or governments needing to decide on a "fair" way to establish the right experts to ask. It is very difficult to suggest a way to do this that would not correlate strongly with "highly successful under the current system". That group of experts would, of course, have a strong bias towards the current system.