wow, starting to feel like papers are not a good metric for scientific progress. Who would've thought...
Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
91–100 of 157 posts
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#92If you have a ton of clinical data on random people, the medicines they have been prescribed, ailments, procedures, etc... it makes sense that blasting millions of queries at that data will produce many papers in medicine for tons of conditions.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#93I blame China. As a researcher in China, you were told to publish, as often as possible, OR ELSE. that's leads to a constant publishing of useless papers. China took the whole idea of "publish or perish" into overdrive.
Also here in Canada. Only the US is perfect!!11
obvious /s
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#94wow, starting to feel like papers are not a good metric for scientific progress. Who would've thought...
I work in a company where in the job description for some positions you have to show that you have a long publishing record... sighs...
Great place to "work"...
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#95Not surprising at all. It reflects a shift in science to one-two people endeavours to group work.
If you use someone's lab, or you take up time they are paid for or that uses a grant they need to be able to reflect that in publications.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What the heck happened to John Ioannidis?" (about his publications during the Covid epidemic.) https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...
Nothing happened to Ioannidis. He did his job as a scientist and said what he thought was right, even when everybody disagreed with him. So he was wrong? So what? To be a scientist means to blunder a lot. In fact, to be a scientist means to (be willing to) blunder much, much more than everybody else because that is the only way to learn. Science, ultimately, only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong .
He really lowered himself by personally attacking a grad student who opposed him – the very definition of punching down.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#97As an academic (CS), I'm able to write one or two decent papers a year, in a very good year, three. Looking at colleagues who write ten a year I already get existential angst, and have to actively tell myself that life is not a competition and some things are more important. Writing fifty (while also teaching, writing grants, mentoring students, etc.) seems mind-numbing, even just in terms of the relatively routine t…
These are mostly people that are bossing other people around, and just review the work occasionally, not actually creating whole drafts.
Most won't know how or literally what to put down on a paper and who to send it to for publication.
If you can independently write a paper you can supervise many more and provide valuable insight from your experience.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#98> The vast majority of hyperprolific authors (7,888 author records, 86%) published in physics. In high-energy and particle physics, projects are done by large international teams that can have upwards of 1,000 members. All participants are listed as authors as a mark of membership of the team, not for writing or revising the papers. We therefore excluded authors in physics. While this is true in general, I'm part of…
It definitely feels a little odd. If everyone is an author, then does authorship really matter? Is authorship broken out in any way? I would think it could be useful to do something like credits on a movie. Here are the writers, the directors, the producers. And then here is the lighting team, and this team worked on these special effects, this other team on these other effects, etc.
Often the core team gets to be the corresponding authors.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#99> The vast majority of hyperprolific authors (7,888 author records, 86%) published in physics. In high-energy and particle physics, projects are done by large international teams that can have upwards of 1,000 members. All participants are listed as authors as a mark of membership of the team, not for writing or revising the papers. We therefore excluded authors in physics. While this is true in general, I'm part of…
"and would involve a couple of hundred people between the review committee, physics group and the collaboration at large who post questions, comments and revise every bit of information." I'm curious whether much of this work materially differs from the work done by peer reviewers in the journal review process. If it does then authorship may be fine, if it doesn't then it seems that either the internal reviewers shou…
Well, quite obviously the peer reviewers the journal selects can't be from inside the experiment, and are thus frequently less well informed than collaboration members on which bugs in the software to look out for for example.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most research amounts to nothing. It’s why they call it research. But we can’t get the 1% of breakthroughs without the 4% of hits, 93% meh’s, and 2% frauds. Not to mention that much published research is mistaken. Above all, it’s hard (at least in the sciences). So anyone willing to follow the scientific method and package their results into a whitepaper is doing good science. The scientific method is ultimately the…
The fact that most research, dare I say by definition, has little value is true. The fact that most published papers have no value is also true. It is also true that some (published) research may go unnoticed and be discovered or rediscovered (much of science is the rediscovery of ideas that were once speculative and then became valuable because of a change in methods, technology, paradigm) later on. It is a rare occ…
> The fact that most published papers have no value is also true.
Is that true though? If I'm about to embark on a bit of extensive research, the first bit of that research would be to see if someone else has already done it. If they have, then there's value to me in not having to spend time/money in repeating what someone else has already done. Or it could show me where other things can be tried instead of just repeating. If we know 999 ways on how not to build a light bulb, we can scratch one more method off by seeing what other people have published.
How is that not considered value?