It is worse in humanities. Many university presses won't dare to publish books on themes that are antithetical to the dominant theories and/or paradigms. Being part of the dominant clique is necessary to publish books there.
Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
131–140 of 203 posts
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#132Not directly related, but the "sign in to medium.com with Google" dialog on the top right corner with my account name on it is really freaking me out.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can often guess who the reviewers are as well. The most obvious tell is "also cite paper X" which is their own 99% of the time.
I don't think this is true from my experience. I've been on several program committees, and have managed a couple as well. Usually if you're above the first-level reviewers (e.g. senior PC, track chair, PC chair), you can see the actual author names and reviewers. Most of the time when an author later says (formally through the review system, or informally in casual conversation) that "I know it's this reviewer who a…
I think there are two aspects to this, the first one as you mention is that often reviewers just asked to cite relevant papers (and it's not unusual they come from the same author, because the fields are small).
The other aspect is, that there are a some black sheep who will ask you to cite a whole bunch of barely relevant papers (often >5) all from the same group. With those you very clearly see that they are abusing the system. I suspect that these instances cloud people's judgement on the first aspect, so they always interpret the question to cite as fraudulent.
As a general advice if you suspect reviewers are try to push their citation counts up, a note to the editor (or PC if a conference) will typically help, because most don't look very favourably at this.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to remember how academia works both in terms of jobs and funding. His funding depended on his advisor. His future job prospects in academia and to a large extent outside of academia depended on his advisor. Because of this extreme multi-year power imbalance, and near indentured servitude at the hands of most advisors who are borderline abusive to students, senior authors control the publication process. It's…
> His future job prospects in academia and to a large extent outside of academia depended on his advisor. In academia, you're absolutely right. But outside, sorry, no. I can perfectly understand how a PhD student under an abusive advisor would feel they're trapped. And I'm gonna sound racist, but I've seen the kind of toxicity there is among Chinese researchers in Western universities, and that's probably making this…
> In academia, you're absolutely right. But outside, sorry, no.
Now consider that there is nothing outside.
Because that's the mindset of PhD students, and more often than not it is also true.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am thinking about applying again from the beginning and start Ph.D. all over. Since I am in love with science. And the only reason I left my home country was because I wanted pursue science. (Science is what makes my love beautiful) But I am afraid maybe my next supervisor will be same (let alone if I leave middle way my current supervisor will not give me letter of recommendation).
You are right to be afraid. Get your PhD. first, then do what you want and try to do honest research if you still feel like it. It's like that in every field, apparently. I've been doing medical research for 10 years and I have yet to meet a honest professor. But with time, I got more independent and while I still have to put up with professoral bullshit I now also can conduct honest and independent projects from tim…
I have to comment on this. I strongly disagree with the assertion that all professors are dishonest. In my experience the vast majority of academics are honest to a fault (much more so than in many other industries).
I acknowledge that there is a problem, there is a percentage of professors which are abusive, dishonest... The problem is like in many other areas those guys (and it is mostly main) often raise to the top. The other issue is that the way academia is set up (and there are some good reasons for it, e.g. academic freedom) , it's very difficult to detect. You almost always only hear rumors and its very difficult to act on the rumors, especially if nobody wants to come forward (which is a problem) and the rumors are from different institutions.
Another aspect to this is, that there will often be some conflict/disagreement between PhD student and supervisor. This can be for when to finish, when, where and what to publish... That does not always mean there is abuse of power, it's mostly professional disagreements similar to disagreements between an engineer and their manager.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#136Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably. Perhaps that’s no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which is going away.
Current U.S./Europe academia seems unable to change from within. It lives on government money which it itself controls and distributes to those who "play ball" - the others are pushed away. The only way a change can happen here if academia-independent people control and distribute money to individuals who showed talent/potential/results in the past. It will take massive outside interference to fix or supplant the cor…
That's not quite how it works and in my opinion not the main problem. Take for example DARPA grants, they are controlled by outside people and I don't think it works. You essentially have a "case worker" often with little understanding of the field pushing in some direction. Moreover the amount of admin around these grants is staggering.
The root cause of the situation is that there is not enough money in the system and compared to previously more money is distributed by competitive grant processes. This results in a couple of things.
1. The cutoff (reviewer mark) where grants get funded or not is completely arbitrary, because it is in the flat part of a arctan or logit type curve, so small differences or luck can me you are able to do your research.
2. Competition therefore is fierce.
3. To balance the odds you have to write a lot of applications (academics now spend most of their time either writing grants or administering their grants, not doing research.)
4. It encourages incremental research, because non-incremental research implies high risk, but no one can afford the risk to fail, because having a significant reduction of publications reduces you chances of getting grants in the future (see 1.). Once you get some gap in your funding its almost impossible to get back.
5. This disadvantages women who want to have children.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right to be afraid. Get your PhD. first, then do what you want and try to do honest research if you still feel like it. It's like that in every field, apparently. I've been doing medical research for 10 years and I have yet to meet a honest professor. But with time, I got more independent and while I still have to put up with professoral bullshit I now also can conduct honest and independent projects from tim…
I have to comment on this. I strongly disagree with the assertion that all professors are dishonest. In my experience the vast majority of academics are honest to a fault (much more so than in many other industries). I acknowledge that there is a problem, there is a percentage of professors which are abusive, dishonest... The problem is like in many other areas those guys (and it is mostly main) often raise to the to…
We must navigate very different fields then , because what I'm seeing cannot be "professional disagreement" mistaken for something else. But even so, this is a sterile debate. What is important is that our academic system selects for bad actors in all fields through the "publish or perish" motto. In my field at least, dedication only will rarely propell you to full professorship, because you are competing with those who are dedicated to both research and academic misconduct. Noone becomes important by being nice. A second and important downside specific to medicine is that most academics also do clinical work. Now what do you think happens when the guys running the clinics are hiding in their office most of the time to write papers? Lack of supervision of juniors, in addition to the fact that hiding in your office often does not make you the best clinician.
What's truly sad is that people will often push for being cared for by the big fish professors when it's actually often the worst choice they have.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#138There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers) is this normal ?
In small fields you know most players which has a similar effect.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#139Looks like the (sad) background story is here : https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-th... Posting here instead of a new submission
That suicide is so unfortunate. As someone who was a PhD student, I understand the perceived gravity of the situation for him. It’s unfortunate he had nobody to put it in perspective.
This is one of the fields that you can easily leave academia for industry or even switch to another academic institution with ease if things start to go bad. Nobody but your own advisor will realistically care about a retracted paper (especially if you do it before publication). And if your advisor does hold it against you, that’s not an advisor you want anyway.
Please, please, please, if you ever find yourself in this situation, just walk away. You are being paid less than a Starbucks Barista to stuff a tenure-track professor’s portfolio with rushed research nobody will realistically care about in 3 years (if it was even relevant to begin with).
A PhD will teach you how to research. 99% of the research that comes out of that process will be useless, incremental crap. Issue retractions, miss deadlines, whatever. The stakes in the CS academic game are so small a complete come-apart as a PhD student can easily be turned into an extended masters degree on a resume.
Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
#140Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably. Perhaps that’s no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which is going away.
There are a lot of possible solutions that scientific community (Early Career Researchers) is working on.
Open Science: There is a growing movement by ECRs to publish Journals that are open access or atleast offer the option to do so with slightly extra costs. This helps to dismantle the centralized consortia of publishing groups that have become too powerful.
Open review: There are journals that allow the reviewers' and authors' comments to be published alongside the paper. This ensures that reviewers are reasonable in their conduct. See eLife for research in natural sciences[0] where once your paper is under review, it is published no matter what. The reviewers can claim that their issues wer not addressed if they feel so and that gets published along the paper's final version. Similary in the computer science community, there are conferences that follow the open review policies as well.
Competition can be replaced with collaborations if the Group Leaders are open minded and are "raised" in such an environment. The next generation of researchers are today's graduate students.
Publish or Perish: This archaic movement can be suppresed when the universities hire people by looking at CVs of applicants where they can only see the papers but not the Journals where they were published. H-index and traditional metrics can be replaced by Altmetrics [1]. The hiring committees need to do the extra work to go through the research of their applicants and not be biased by the journals in which they publish.
These are only few things that are being done. See OpenScience movement variants[3] to explore more in this direction.
[0] https://reviewer.elifesciences.org/author-guide/journal-poli...
[1] https://www.altmetric.com/about-altmetrics/what-are-altmetri...