> In the scientific world there are no spammers and there is no direct commercial advantage to creating a lot of nonsense paper that cite your own paper, also there is some oversight in the world of science and the people there have a reasonably high level of integrity. Um... what ? If it were anyone but the OP, who always writes with a lot of thoughtfulness and insight, I would've assumed the graf above is satire. A…
The Destruction of the Web
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#42This is a nice description of the hell of modern WWW. But things are worse than that! With few exceptions (Stack Exchange and Wikipedia are notable) most searches will return sites that have been SEOd. My Google search for [spectacles cases] returns these two sites on the first page: ( http://www.spectaclecases.co.uk/ ) ( http://www.aglassescase.co.uk/ ) > Welcome to SpectacleCases.co.uk. You will find a wide selecti…
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#43> In the scientific world there are no spammers and there is no direct commercial advantage to creating a lot of nonsense paper that cite your own paper, also there is some oversight in the world of science and the people there have a reasonably high level of integrity. Um... what ? If it were anyone but the OP, who always writes with a lot of thoughtfulness and insight, I would've assumed the graf above is satire. A…
What are some salient examples of gaming in the world of Academic discovery and citation?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-e...
> The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. > > But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen).
And the institution of medicine has long been plagued with accusations of fake studies, underwritten by drug companies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/useless-pharmaceut...
> LAST month, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a scathing reassessment of a 12-year-old research study of Neurontin, a seizure drug made by Pfizer. The study, which had included more than 2,700 subjects and was carried out by Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer), was notable for how poorly it was conducted. The investigators were inexperienced and untrained, and the design of the study was so flawed it generated few if any useful conclusions. Even more alarming, 11 patients in the study died and 73 more experienced “serious adverse events.” Yet there have been few headlines, no demands for sanctions or apologies, no national bioethics commissions pledging to investigate. Why not? > > One reason is that the study was not quite what it seemed. It looked like a clinical trial, but as litigation documents have shown, it was actually a marketing device known as a “seeding trial.” The purpose of seeding trials is not to advance research but to make doctors familiar with a new drug.
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#44For all intents and purposes, Google is the Internet lobby that has the ear of legislators. They're not gonna stand for any kind of protocol reboot that would destroy their fundamental and wonderfully lucrative business model.
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#45I'm "relatively" new to the web. I started using it around 2004. To me, the only way to browse the web goes through Google. I don't think there's a single day I spent in front of the computer without me hitting Google at one point. I even use Google search when I'm specifically targeting Wikipedia or StackOverflow. For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier deca…
> For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier decade of the Web? I'm assuming Google is not the first search engine available, but I'm pretty sure search engines were not the only way to go around. Yahoo! used to have humans looking at websites and adding them to an index. Yes, someone would send in a link to a porn website, and someone on the porn indexing team…
I remember around the time CompuServe bought The Source, CIS was charging based on the speed of your connection (I think $12.80/hr was for a 9600 baud connection). There were several products to minimize your online time that would script connections - go to your favorite forums, download new messages, post anything you had pending, and hang up.
When AOL came on the scene, they eventually overtook the old walled-garden players by tactics like providing access to Usenet and the web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September was an unfortunate fallout from that), and provided a much cheaper pricing model. CIS tried to catch up by buying the Spry company, using its browser (basically a branded NCSA Mosaic), releasing scripts for Trumpet Winsock to get to the net from a CompuServe x.25 trunk, and added the option to use that same net connection to telnet back into CompuServe.
It was confusing, caused too much network traffic, and CompuServe mismanaged it all, and ultimately collapsed, to be bought out by AOL... who eventually lost relevance outside of the chat universe.
Good times, good times.
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#46I'm "relatively" new to the web. I started using it around 2004. To me, the only way to browse the web goes through Google. I don't think there's a single day I spent in front of the computer without me hitting Google at one point. I even use Google search when I'm specifically targeting Wikipedia or StackOverflow. For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier deca…
> how would you look for specific information (like, for instance, how would you research the working internals of a car engine for a school project?) Maybe I'm just an old fart (I'm 26 btw :P ) but I went to the library.
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#47"Destruction of the Web"? This is really going to destroy the web? Though it is an issue, I hardly think that this is going to destroy anything. May inconvenience some things, cause confusion about when to link (and when to unlink) in the short term until an equilibrium is reached and the next SEO change comes along. But I think that this title itself is Link Bait (something else that might be "destroying the web" by…
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#48Re: The Destruction of the Web
#49I'm "relatively" new to the web. I started using it around 2004. To me, the only way to browse the web goes through Google. I don't think there's a single day I spent in front of the computer without me hitting Google at one point. I even use Google search when I'm specifically targeting Wikipedia or StackOverflow. For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier deca…
>for instance, how would you research the working internals of a car engine for a school project?
Before search engines, I would consult my personal library of books, which included a paper encyclopedia, or visit a library and look up "automobile engines" in the subject index of the card catalog. Or maybe ask a friend.
Of course, most of the things I look up in search engines nowadays I did not even try to research or ask about before search engines: I just did without the information. It wasn't so bad :)
Re: The Destruction of the Web
#50> In the scientific world there are no spammers and there is no direct commercial advantage to creating a lot of nonsense paper that cite your own paper, also there is some oversight in the world of science and the people there have a reasonably high level of integrity. Um... what ? If it were anyone but the OP, who always writes with a lot of thoughtfulness and insight, I would've assumed the graf above is satire. A…
What are some salient examples of gaming in the world of Academic discovery and citation?
You need to have a good publication record (i.e., papers in journals and conference proceedings, some monographs with a prestigious publisher can also help). When you can't publish in high-impact journals/conferences, you lower your expectations and spread your papers over several journals/conferences, some _will_ publish you.
The next thing is to split up your research results over many papers in order to have many publications; differences between the papers are small (and you can reference to yourself, i.e., to the "bigger picture" of which this paper is a part of). That's btw the same with grant applications: Promise much, do only 30% and have the rest as a follow-up (grant renewal). Splitting up results over several publications and grants plus the usual academic behaviour (internal status games, academic nitpicking) delay research by 300%.
Then you can create citation cartels where you mutually reference with your colleagues.
But it's not that researchers are evil, often it's the funding source that uses those metrics (e.g., publication count) that are then gamed.