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Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

blog.pnas.org

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Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#151

Post by rcpt »

abrichr wrote: post #108
rcpt wrote: post #48

> When the rare paper does break through, it usually does so in less than 12 months, suggesting that popularity comes from social media, news coverage, or via existing networks of people who are already well-connected in the subject area—rather than from citations in other work I buy ads for one of my papers. Only a few dollars per month but I like to think it's worth it

Fascinating. If I understand correctly, you are saying that you buy paid advertising for academic papers that you have authored, is that right? Can you please elaborate? e.g. what platforms do you use, which keywords / audiences are you targeting?

I buy ads to the arxiv link to a paper I wrote.

I tried Twitter (the paper is about Twitter) but seems like the minimum spend is $50 per day. Also got the feeling that they weren't targeted enough based on who followed me.

I've had a small promo running on Google search ads for a few years (disclaimer I now work at Google). The keywords are roughly what's in the title. I don't know if it's leading to citations.

I don't know if anyone else has done this.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#152

Post by lumost »

kloch wrote: post #47
PaulHoule wrote: post #25

One thing obvious is the breakdown between theory and experiment in physics. Newton's great accomplishment was discovering a link between terrestrial and extraterrestrial physics. Today on the large scale we see it takes multiple kinds of "dark matter" to explain the rotation of galaxies, structure of galaxy clusters, and cosmology. "Dark matter" evades any attempt to detect it on Earth. Einstein's prediction of how…

I don't understand why consensus jumped to the conclusion that there must be a new form of undetectable matter instead trying to figure out what we don't know about gravity. Theoretical particle physics is even worse. There haven't been any advances since the 1970's. Experimental particle physics has done a great job in verifying/testing the predictions from the 1960's/1970's but theoretical physicists are stuck in a…

The trouble is that astronomers have limited ability to detect matter and estimate its mass. Given the predictions from GR, the idea that there was new astronomy and particle physics was easily more attractive.

~50 years on without significant progress for particle physics + GR means we are starting to be interested in alternatives.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#153

Post by Ekaros »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #94
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's obviously waning if you look at any field that deals with physical world: a car from 1940 looks totally different than one from 1980's, but the one from 2020 and 1980 looks almost the same. Space rockets are same as they were in 80's, where are nuclear engines, fusion propultion, etc? Its the same for airplanes, appliances, and everything execept computers. https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/145134227466…

Car styling being somewhat static does not imply that Scientific Progress is waning. You could say something similar about clothing styles: comparing clothing styles between 1980 and 1990 there was a lot of difference. Comparing between 2010 and 2020 - not much difference. This has a lot more to do with economics and tastes than scientific progress (or lack thereof).

Car styling being static is because we are likely very close or at some local optima. That is minimising the drag. In past we may have had some idea, but now we can compute the best shape. Plus there is regulatory pressure that makes some solutions illegal.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#155

Post by conformist »

From the study's abstract: "The deluge of new papers may deprive reviewers and readers the cognitive slack required to fully recognize and understand novel ideas. Competition among many new ideas may prevent the gradual accumulation of focused attention on a promising new idea."

- This appears to be a key problem in academic research that matches my personal experience. More papers with less novelty are not only not beneficial, but beyond some point they become a net tax on everyone in the field. Without innovative approaches to fix the incentive structure of modern science, this is going to get worse over time.

Are there any obvious solutions aside from "hacks" such as e.g. private foundations flooding specific fields with cash to reduce the need to publish?

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#156

Post by robocat »

xmprt wrote: post #140
epistasis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I only see my little corner of biology, but I am continually astonished at what is being learned. Often times the pace of learning and the diversification is such that I often don't find out about significant discoveries until a couple years after they happen, and I can still bring the ideas to others years later after that and people will say "holy crap that's amazing, I can't believe I hadn't heard of that.…

Biology is one field that seems to be making massive breakthroughs recently. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of theoretical sciences like Physics haven't have similar breakthroughs in decades.

> Physics

I believe that the “hard” sciences are much much easier than any soft science, which is one reason they have progressed so far. When you are arguing with a presumably objective reality, one party remains rational.

Hard sciences are seen as harder due to university systems, and nothing to do with actual genuine difficulty of the science.

Soft sciences are much harder to tease out fact from fiction, and your discoveries often modify reality so even your facts actually change (macro economics). Also for a lot of soft sciences, there are a lot of facts that don’t have to make sense (path dependencies for phenotypes of random mutations).

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#158

Post by carbocation »

screye wrote: post #149

Imo, it has to do with incentives and rewards.(in CS at the very least) The Hindex is a measure thats become the target. So 1 seminal paper is much much worse than 10 completely forgettable papers. It is also common to divide seminal work into smaller publishable morsels to rack up the hindex at the cost of novelty and clarity. The lack of incentive to pursue novel works, also means that most papers are incremental b…

It's painful because (IMHO) the H index is just a much worse approximation of something that we could actually achieve with PageRank for academic citations. In that case, a bunch of middling papers would be rewarded, but so too would one critical paper that lays a foundation for a field.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#159

Post by supernovae »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #104
supernovae wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship is designed for mars. They built a new space craft that will be re-usable, at a cost efficiency never seen before that uses technology specially designed because of Mars. It's engines will use Methane - something no other manufacturer was able to master because of specific issues with those styles of engines and they did it in with the purpose of generating methane on mars to be able to fly back. The methane…

"First flight computer that could tiake off and land" Soviet Buran could do that in the 80's "Starship is designed for mars" Original starship design was 5x larger and could take meaningfull payload to Mars. It had to be scaled down so that it use the ancient Saturn 5 launchpad and other infrastructure and be more affordable. Current starship is in the same weightlifting category as saturn 5. "First engines to use Me…

Landing a winged aircraft is different than landing a rocket.

Starship is designed for mars and its design changes pending mission realities. The fact they're progressing so quick is awesome.

First engines to use Methane are great - and it shows a mission profile that is correct for a trip to mars - since they can use science to generate fuel while on mars.

Uranium wouldn't be a revolution and there is no way it would ever pass certification for leaving earth orbit beyond small decay batteries that have been used for 60+ years.

Just because you don't agree with the cool shit going on, doesn't mean it isn't cool.

And if it could have been done 60 years ago, it would have been done 60 years ago.

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