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“Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

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Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#41

Post by chubot »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #38
chubot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. Plenty of 16 year olds have written say windows managers that thousands of people use -- that's production quality code. Your second argument is circular -- I'm saying a valid research goal should be to write solid and useful code, and then explain it. For example, you could write an OS kernel or kernel subsystem to fill some particular part of the design space. A great but rare example is what the auth…

All I mean is that fixing non-essential bugs, making your code pretty, worrying about small performance regressions, writing thorough documentation, polishing the user interface, porting your code to N platforms, dealing with copyrights and patents and trademarks, ensuring good distribution of your code either by selling it or making packages for major distros, and taking care of your users generally doesn't help you…

You're still arguing circularly. I know that what you mention is exactly the reason why academics don't write more code.

I'm saying it would be better for society if the academic culture emphasized the craft of coding, rather than solely "new ideas". The whole point of this article is that the emphasis on "new ideas" incentivizes fraud.

Academic culture changes faster than you think. I expect that the structural changes caused by online courses will have a big effect in the near future.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#42

Post by foobarbazqux »

chubot wrote: post #41
foobarbazqux wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I mean is that fixing non-essential bugs, making your code pretty, worrying about small performance regressions, writing thorough documentation, polishing the user interface, porting your code to N platforms, dealing with copyrights and patents and trademarks, ensuring good distribution of your code either by selling it or making packages for major distros, and taking care of your users generally doesn't help you…

You're still arguing circularly. I know that what you mention is exactly the reason why academics don't write more code. I'm saying it would be better for society if the academic culture emphasized the craft of coding, rather than solely "new ideas". The whole point of this article is that the emphasis on "new ideas" incentivizes fraud. Academic culture changes faster than you think. I expect that the structural chan…

In my experience, it's already at the point where a focus on trade and craft actually hampers innovation in an academic context, because so much of the funding comes from industry. Most papers today are about safe, incremental improvements rather than bold new ideas, because there's no obvious money in significant breaks from tradition. I think we need to let academia and industry each do their job: academia can produce great, wild ideas and discover fundamental truths, and industry can refine them into something profitable.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#43

Post by joe_the_user »

weland wrote: post #30
joe_the_user wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but crap as such isn't an ethical problem. In fact, theoretically it would be the job of publications, not authors, to prevent crap from being published. Plus, if the competition wasn't so gruesome and that evaluation criteria weren't shallow, the pressure to pad one's CV wouldn't be so great. "Holy ethical violation batman, the slaves are slipping out of their manacles and they certified on their honor they wou…

Yes, it is. It's an ethical problem because making researchers sift through more crap just so that you can pad up your CV is slowing down further research into your field. I know it's an oversimplification, but the essence of it is true: curing cancer is already hard enough. It shouldn't be made any harder by ambitiously exceeding your dead tree quota. Sauce: abandoned an academic career :-)

Uh, by the token, a badly designed desk which makes things harder for researchers is an ethical problem.

I wouldn't minimize the problematic quality of having a bunch of crap in research or what-all else. But the thing is that, as you know, the academic world puts extreme pressure on people to both follow the rules and to makes themselves look good. When any violation of a rule-set can be called an "ethical violation" when it's really not that, it cheapens the whole concept of ethics. Which isn't surprising given how monumentally unethical it is to set up system.

Essentially, I can't help seeing people with a lot of power engaging in seriously unethetical things and happy to blur the lines between that and people cuts corners in response to pressure (and that stuff winds up being more pressure on people which doesn't actually stop the corner-cutting).

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#44

Post by pizza_boy »

chubot wrote: post #12
pizza_boy wrote: post #8

I've said as much in the article comments, but it's worth repeating here: there's really no surprise that this sort of thing happens when more than a million articles are published every year. There is so much pressure on researchers to publish. I really do think the way to solve this sort of problem is to find ways to give researchers credit for other forms of contributions. This is what figshare is doing with datas…

For Computer Science Ph.D.'s, I think you should get credit for writing code. Either production-quality open source code, or pedagogical code. I'm looking at the Stanford Pintos kernel and MIT xv6 kernel. While there were minor papers from those projects, I think they were more like a labor of love. When you consider the coding effort, those projects probably took 10x the effort than a typical paper. But yeah it woul…

ImpactStory monitors github, which is pretty cool. Example: http://impactstory.org/CarlBoettiger

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#45

Post by aidenn0 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #43
weland wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. It's an ethical problem because making researchers sift through more crap just so that you can pad up your CV is slowing down further research into your field. I know it's an oversimplification, but the essence of it is true: curing cancer is already hard enough. It shouldn't be made any harder by ambitiously exceeding your dead tree quota. Sauce: abandoned an academic career :-)

Uh, by the token, a badly designed desk which makes things harder for researchers is an ethical problem. I wouldn't minimize the problematic quality of having a bunch of crap in research or what-all else. But the thing is that, as you know, the academic world puts extreme pressure on people to both follow the rules and to makes themselves look good. When any violation of a rule-set can be called an "ethical violation…

I would say intentionally designing a desk that is uncomfortable and will slow people down, and then passing it off as comfortable is unethical

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#46

Post by javert »

chubot wrote: post #21
javert wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of being a scientist is learning how to communicate your results. And anyway, writing is required for good thinking. As a PhD student implementor, yes, my theory colleagues get way more publications than I hypothetically could even if I were a better student than I am. That makes it hard to get an academic job, but otherwise doesn't matter too much.

Sure, I didn't say you shouldn't write. There are plenty of people who write great code and then write about it. The author of Redis author has a great blog, where he explains various design and implementation issues. That kind of work may not qualify for most academic journals. But it is a lot more valuable than a lot of academic research and should be a valid way to get a Ph.D.

Is what he is doing scientific reesarch in computer science? Possibly, if he also writes up his results to that they can go into the scientific literature. If he does that, he can get a PhD.

A PhD in CS does not mean "extremely good software engineer," it means "scientist."

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#47

Post by javert »

anonymousDan wrote: post #34
pyoung wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an issue with conferences? My guess is that conferences would prefer to have interesting topics, and probably wouldn't care as much if the material was partially recycled. I have known people who presented early results of a study at one conference, and the final results at another. They were upfront about it, so it wasn't unethical, but I guess you could accuse them of resume padding. Personally, I would pre…

I really don't view this as resume padding. Think of it in terms of the agile methodology - you don't want to spend a year of your life working on an idea that the rest of your community thinks is irrelevant or has a major flaw. So you publish your preliminary findings in a workshop, garner feedback, and then publish the full work later on in a conference. Seems like a sensible approach to me.

I agree, that is the smart approach.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#48

Post by javert »

pyoung wrote: post #28
javert wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt a little uneasy reading this in the article. I write CS conference papers that are all in the same area, so obviously, some of the background information (which is a pretty small part of the overall paper) is basically copied from paper to paper. And that part is the most polished. I don't feel uneasy because I'm doing anything remotely unethical---I'm not. I feel uneasy because it sounded a bit like the descr…

Is this an issue with conferences? My guess is that conferences would prefer to have interesting topics, and probably wouldn't care as much if the material was partially recycled. I have known people who presented early results of a study at one conference, and the final results at another. They were upfront about it, so it wasn't unethical, but I guess you could accuse them of resume padding. Personally, I would pre…

The conferences I submit to don't care if some of the background material (which is sort of boilerplate---but it is nonetheless necessary to state your assumptions) is similar across papers. Really, you couldn't do it any other way.

I will say that academic (i.e., scientific) conferences should never include "recycled" or "old but interesting" material. There has to be some new research results. Otherwise, it's not science. The point of these conferences is not to entertain, it's to push forward the scope of knowledge.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#49

Post by joe_the_user »

aidenn0 wrote: post #45
joe_the_user wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, by the token, a badly designed desk which makes things harder for researchers is an ethical problem. I wouldn't minimize the problematic quality of having a bunch of crap in research or what-all else. But the thing is that, as you know, the academic world puts extreme pressure on people to both follow the rules and to makes themselves look good. When any violation of a rule-set can be called an "ethical violation…

I would say intentionally designing a desk that is uncomfortable and will slow people down, and then passing it off as comfortable is unethical

Parse the sentence above in the context of being a reply to another post, darn it.
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