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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

#191

Post by WJW »

ScottBurson wrote: post #124
bumby wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience: I proposed a thesis to an advisor who deemed it unlikely to work. He ran it by a colleague who came to the same conclusion. I went to a different major and pursued the same thesis and invited the previous faculty who initially turned it down to the defense because it was relevant to their field. It was frustrating to hear them voice their opinions in the defense that they felt, “of course it world work…

I guess the lesson is, when an advisor rejects your thesis idea, get them to put their reasons in writing.

What would that get you though, other than knowing you were right (which you already knew without having it in writing) and (if you decide to publicly call them out on it) enemies for life in your chosen field of study?

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

#192

Post by LolWolf »

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.

> Why don’t research groups just publish to their own websites or directories like arxiv?

Depending on the field, this is often the case. Here are some examples from both of the labs I'm in, with PDFs available:

https://stanford.edu/~boyd/papers.html

https://nqp.stanford.edu/journal-publications

(I also post the PDFs and links to code on my website, as well.)

> What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020?

Partly peer review, partly signaling game, and partly exposition/advertisement/reach of papers. Those are, of course, all intimately linked in scientific fields.

> I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics

I think a lot of them have taken the Twitter route! There are a few who also have their own somewhat-updated blogs (myself included).

> I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture.

The problem is kind of general, though: (a) writing good, useful blog posts takes a long time, especially when attempting to distill the topic even further for a general audience, and (b) writing (good) papers really does take a long time. (Of course, there are many, many poorly-written papers, but, unless the results are truly incredible, almost nobody spends time deciphering them.)

For example, I think I'm a fairly fast/decent academic writer, yet on a given paper, I spend roughly half of the time doing research and the other half of the time finding the right presentation/abstraction to present, along with writing and editing a given exposition to make it clear and legible. Any given paper will take me ≥20 total hours in structuring, writing, and editing (not including research hours). Reviews can take ≥40.

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

#193

Post by collyw »

onurcel wrote: post #3

I like the idea but I don't really get why they accept "statistically insignificant" results. What I expect from a scientific paper is to prove (even emprically) something. For example, if a paper claims something like "we show that using method X instead of Y doesn't improve the results", it won't get published on most journals... except this one, which is awesome, but the paper still has to prove that claim.

It should stop other groups wasting their time on the same research, no?

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

#194

Post by ScottBurson »

WJW wrote: post #191
ScottBurson wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the lesson is, when an advisor rejects your thesis idea, get them to put their reasons in writing.

What would that get you though, other than knowing you were right (which you already knew without having it in writing) and (if you decide to publicly call them out on it) enemies for life in your chosen field of study?

Oh, I wouldn't do it publicly. The point would be to push back, in private discussions, against the argument that the result was not interesting enough to publish.

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

#195

Post by yosito »

refurb wrote: post #39
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.

Speaking from my own experience in the physical sciences, labs don't self publish unsurprising results because there are only so many hours in the day and it's not worth the effort. Even just putting the results on your own website is a lot of work. Pulling all of the data together, analyzing it, putting it in visuals, writing up the results. It can be hard to justify committing that much time to something where the…

So the same reason programmers don't document our code? We don't realize that without communicating our work, others can't make use of it. I think this is even more true in science than in programming.

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

#196

Post by bumby »

ianhorn wrote: post #179
sullyj3 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

I've been noticing a variant of this in myself lately. Maybe I think about some problem and stew on it and think to myself that it's probably not possible, or at least I can't come up with ideas. Then I hear that somebody else has made progress and suddenly I have a bunch of ideas. Somehow switching from "how could this work" or "can this work" to "how did they do it" leads me down entirely different paths. I've been…

This is an interesting perspective that I think may exhibit itself in many domains. I’m reminded of the fact that the sub-four minute mile was impossible and then when it was first broken, many others completed the same feat in a relatively short period of time

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

#197

Post by dmd »

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…

One of the most important things my PhD advisor taught me was to design an experiment so that whichever way the result comes out, it tells you something interesting (even if one of those ways might be more surprising, and more interesting).

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

#198

Post by cinquemb »

fock wrote: post #146
cinquemb wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily not everyone feels this way, and may be willing to mail an author if they found some mistake in their open archived paper/data/document they read because they think it could be useful/interesting and the author may be willing to update it with all the relevant metadata acknowledging the edit. The more of academia that happens outside of well defined institutions, the better for the public.

but journals and peer-review enforce this. That's a good thing (though I agree that letting journals do this is stupid – arxiv is out there, why can't they sign up unis to make people review the things there.)

Yeah, but it comes with all the gate keeping, prestige laundering and grant hamster wheel dynamics. Works for some, but not all.

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

#199

Post by jiggunjer »

akjssdk wrote: post #109
jiggunjer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's laughable they still charge extra for color pictures.

They charge extra to have your pictures printed in color, online everything is in color anyway. I think that is a fair practice no?

No. If you want to submit color regardless of medium. Besides, color printing isn't that costly compared to their high margins. It's in their favor too if people use color images, the age of simple scatterplots has passed for most fields.

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

#200

Post by ylem »

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…

Nature scientific reports? A number of people have mixed feelings about the journal, but I think it does encourage people to publish work that is technically correct, but not exciting. I remember going through the pain of publishing a boring piece of work before that corrected a boring but incorrect study by someone else. It's tedious, but I try to think of it as community service.
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