Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by analog31 » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #75

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…

Heliocentrism was proposed in the 3rd century BC. When it was confirmed? Microorganisms were hypothesized in 11th century, were confirmed in 17th century.

18th century, due to the consequences of Newtonian mechanics.

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

#172

Post by YetAnotherNick » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

citizenpaul wrote: post #21

The entire college phd system is toxic and self serving. At my local college the guy the physic department building was named after was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood and when he died they just mothballed all his "projects" equipment. No one had any idea what it was or what to do with it and it filled a good part of the building. He was not easy to get along with and shot down anything that he…

I am not in favour of naming people, but in case of academics I think senior professor is something like being an employer. It's not going to change when people see it as a distant example. You could say I don't understand the method of this person and don't like his/her approach.

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

#173

Post by brandmeyer » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #141

supernovae wrote: post #10

No, it isn't waning. There are struggles, but that doesn't mean its waning. We're having massive progress in medicine, space, cosmology, environment, biology, food, transportation. Hell, the only thing that's waning is public perception of science and that seems to be a deliberate political attack.

Whatever politics touches, it taints. No surprise here. But one of the items you mentioned is food . I sort-of doubt that we have a great progress in food. People seem to be much fatter than ever before. That would suggest a lot of cheap calories, but less quality of food overall. Unless we measure progress in food by raw caloric content, we might actually be regressing. The burden of metabolic diseases is certainly…

You'd be wrong there, too. Genetically engineered crops have boosted food yields to an extent not seen since the Haber-Bosch process.

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

#174

Post by YetAnotherNick » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

merpnderp wrote: post #34

ThePhysicist wrote: post #27

There are probably 100 times more scientists doing research than in the 1920's and the technological means for research are incomparably more advanced, so in that regard we're definitely moving at a much faster pace. Progress in fields like physics is definitely more incremental though as compared to e.g. the first half of the last century when the foundations of modern physics were laid (quantum mechanis, special an…

But what about the replication crisis? Was there such a crisis in the 1920's? Because the motivations for things like p-hacking all point at something broken in science.

Back then we didn't need replication. If Freud approved it, it was correct.

BTW this is only half joke. He is still the most cited researcher ever.

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

#175

Post by rcpt » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

zibzab wrote: post #162

rcpt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is this so important to you that you spend money on it? Do you feel it helps your carrier if you have a highly cited paper?

I think it's neat.

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

#176

Post by _game_of_life » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:04 PM UTC

BlueTie wrote: post #63

Understandability is waning. Which in many places amounts to the same thing. Newtonian physics could be understood by an average child. General Relativity could be understood by intellectuals somewhat. The cutting edge of physics now is barely understood by the people who are publishing the papers. For additional progress to continue in a lot of fields we're giving up a lot of understanding. If we give a mouse a maze…

Indulge me with an odd potential counter-point though.

What if human knowledge is fundamentally both more inductive and collectivist than we care to admit? After all, Hume's problem of induction (that deductive reasoning stems from induction) does seem to suggest this as a potential resolution.

Isn't understanding mostly a set of connections and relationships about a thing? I can use memorized/practiced knowledge of trig and calc to solve problems, sure, but just like the rat if I was born 4000 years ago I'd probably just struggle with the concept of negative numbers -- with near certainly I wouldn't be able to invent them to solve a maze either.

So I would argue that perhaps all knowledge and understanding seems to be fundamentally inductive, and is hard to conveive of with just a single person in isolation, same as a mouse. Large communities of people with millenia of progress, useful abstractions, and recorded insight though?

Perhpas understanding is scalable with communities and time, and thinking of understanding on the individual level of a mouse or a human is missing the forest for the trees?

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

#177

Post by tonmoy » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

Ah. That explains the stagnation in fields like molecular biology and electrical engineering /s

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

#178

Post by prionassembly » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

carbocation wrote: post #158

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.

Wouldn't betwenness centrality be better?

Think of an army randomly moving through your citation graph; the more particularly nodes are trampled over, the more pagerank it has.

Now: if this army is informed about the shortest routes and instead moves about optimally, the most-trampled over places have higher betweenness centrality. I'd like my simulated citing scientist to be smart.

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

#179

Post by screye » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

luckluckgoosed wrote: post #170

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…

Doesn't h-index prevent exactly the scenario of having 10 forgettable papers? Having a couple of great papers yields a high h-index, but 10 forgettable papers would hold the number at a low count because you need N papers with at least N citations each. So a seminar paper would +1 to that h-index indefinitely, whereas low value papers would upper bound the h-index to their citation count.

It kind of regresses to a median. 1 big paper, and 100 papers with zero citations aren't that useful.

However, most top phd students/ assistant professors hover around the nebulous 5-30 hindex where getting 30 citations is a lot easier than publishing 30 papers. So, in most cases, you will prefer to figure out quantity, because the quality bar is so low. Additionally, they and lab mates always cite each other which leads to a free 10-ish citations overtime anyway. Lastly, authorship priority is not taken into account in hindex. So, a bunch of secondary-authors can easily get those numbers up at massively industrialized labs. So a small set of productive 1st authorships are given lower weightage than a large list of low-contribution 2nd authorships. Almost all super-high hindex professors are more like CEOs of a research company than primary researchers.

H-index, like all metrics is useful. It sort of shows the median quality of papers by an author assuming that equal time is spent on all papers. It is informative, but making it too important in academia has led to it getting gamed with counter-productive incentive structures.

H-index ignores away a lot qualities that are incredibly important to being a productive researcher, and has led to researchers with such qualities being progressively pushed out of academia ever since it has become THE target.

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

#180

Post by pontus » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:56 PM UTC

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…

One of the more convincing argument I've heard is the "bullet cluster". Basically it's composed of two clusters of galaxies that recently collided. Since dark matter and normal matter interact differently (dark matter interacting weakly), you could imagine that the two would have different centers of mass following such a collision.

If there's really just modified gravity without any dark matter, the distribution of the regular matter would be sufficient to model the gravitational dynamics but if there is such a thing as dark matter, you'd see that the gravitational effects would be consistent with a center of mass which is displaced from the center of mass for the regular matter. This is, in fact, what you see, suggesting that there really is some type of dark matter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster