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New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

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Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#81

Post by smabie »

derefr wrote: post #60
smabie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should have less transparency, not more. Right now the peer review process is single-blind, but it really should be double-blind. Even if someone doesn't have a PhD or work at a research institution, they should be able to publish good science. Right now, that just isn't possible. And the opposite problem is also true: if you're a big shot in your field, you'll be able to find at least one journal that will publis…

Getting that benefit only requires double-blinding during the review process. There’s no reason that both sides of the blinding cannot be removed (and also revealed to third parties) after the review process is complete.

I can't think of any real upside of that, but can think of a lot of downside. Humans, and especially academics (I've noticed a trend in my work environments: the less money everyone makes, the more power is sublimated into inane dick measuring contests) are petty, and less personal it is, the better.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#82

Post by mycall »

kraetzin wrote: post #27
owenshen24 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks to hear. Null results are important, as you say, if only to dissuade others from doing the same. See also the "file-drawer problem" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias ). Also, with regards to the incentives in the field and the lack of null results, there's always Ioannidis's classic work ( https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... ).

Those are some good reads, and have absolutely been my experience. It's depressing how many publications that I've come across don't provide the whole story, and are probably false. I've found that looking at what a paper doesn't report can be far more important that what they claim.

I wonder how many novel techniques could come out of these types of reports if they were actually analyzed by ML or NLP.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#83

Post by a9h74j »

I haven't seen anyone mentioning this scary thing, true when I was at a top-10 university:

No significant-enough publication, no Ph.D., even after years of all-in work and an accepted dissertation are done.

Things might have changed, but this is up there with foreign language requirement in terms of fine print nobody reads going in.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#84

Post by mycall »

gus_massa wrote: post #67
willj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... it seems like this would be a good thing for undergrads to do in a class setting or an internship. It would give them experience writing an actual paper, albeit with null results.

It would require a lot of babysitting. Some objects have a few slightly different definitions (for example,one book has a definition, and the other book the definition is 1/2 of that). Sometimes the programs to run the calculations don't use the same variables than the paper (perhaps the team changed the opinion, or the main reference, and the graph must show x+y vs y). Sometimes the work that should be included in t…

> It is not usual to get a bunch of data and just publish it without some additional work.

I thought that is what data lakes and event sourcing is suppose to solve.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#85

Post by mycall »

zapzupnz wrote: post #59
choxi wrote: post #32

Why don’t research groups just publish to their own websites or directories like arxiv? What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020? Honest question, I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics but I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture. We should have a Substack/OnlyFans for scientists.

> What's the role of an academic journal in 2020? For me, trustworthiness. Not all journals are equal but some are held in such high esteem that I would grant a lot more credence to the findings of an article published in a journal than one self-published. I have neither the time or will to assess the merits of each individual who might publish something. If a name is sufficiently big within a field, it's usually in…

If a self-published article included full equipment and software to replicate their results in a multimedia fashion (basically included engineering), would that alter your snob-ness?

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#86

Post by juped »

choxi wrote: post #32

Why don’t research groups just publish to their own websites or directories like arxiv? What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020? Honest question, I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics but I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture. We should have a Substack/OnlyFans for scientists.

Institutional bureaucracy only cares about official journals. People in real fields use arXiv anyway - the more the researchers use arXiv or similar, the realer the field.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#88

Post by skosuri »

choxi wrote: post #32

Why don’t research groups just publish to their own websites or directories like arxiv? What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020? Honest question, I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics but I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture. We should have a Substack/OnlyFans for scientists.

1. Plenty of scientists do. In biology, medRxiv and bioRxiv are pretty popular. For example, all publications from my lab are first put there (www.kosurilab.org/publications.html). If we have smaller pieces of work, we tend to just open source them. It's not widespread practice, but it's definitely not uncommon.

2. Plenty of good blogs, open source results & protocols, a strong github community in academia. Again, not widespread, but not uncommon either.

3. The role of academic journal is attention. There are heirachy of journals meant to signal quality, and they are hard to get into. They are very very useful as a signal for future career prospects (much in the same way as going to a good school).

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#89

Post by skosuri »

kraetzin wrote: post #14

Half of my PhD thesis is considered "unpublishable" because, after doing the work, my supervisors felt it's actually "unsurprising" that it didn't work out. We took methods that had been exploited to improve on previous results for over a decade to their logical extreme, and found that this method no longer leads to improvements. After doing the work it seems obvious. A paper on the subject would almost be considered…

1. Other than your time, why not preprint it?

2. As an aside, I can't tell you how many times I've tried to work on stuff, it ends up working, and then I find papers and people saying what we did would never work. Sometimes the ignorance is good.

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