Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

> Proclaiming that your work is a “promising first step” in your introduction, despite being fully aware that nobody will ever build on it.

Science produces discrete units which can be used in different ways, if not in their exact form from a preceding research. I am not sure it’s reasonable to say that existing ideas, even if not cited, are not inspirational (to the researchers themselves). Peer-review isn’t perfect, but I think that all accepted papers have something academically or scientifically relevant, even if there’s no guarantee that the paper will generate hundreds of subsequent citations. I think improving your subsequent work is more important, which includes mentioning why you think some previous work may not be as relevant anymore. This last step is often missing from many research papers.

I think the author is right that it doesn’t quite make sense to publish anything you know isn’t quite correct. But I can think of several papers in different fields which someone may think are “not quite correct”, but the goal of such papers, I think, is to demonstrate the power of low probability scenarios, or edge cases. Edge cases are important because they break expected behavior, and are often the root cause of system fragility, system evolution, or poor generalization in other systems.

I agree with the analysis completely, but the solution is depressing. I keep thinking that publications on arxiv might be a better source of knowledge given the motivation for publishing there is not a contribution to career progression. Keyword search over arxiv papers? But perhaps we should bring back the idea of anonymous publishing:-0

There shouldn't be an ethical dilemma. If you find out your previous paper was wrong, you can publish a new paper saying so. That's 2 papers for the price of one(ish). Everyone wins :P

What's funny is that if you're well-read in your field, all such bullshit is plainly apparent. You know what the good baseline is, for example, and you know why the author didn't choose it. You know the deficiencies of the benchmarks and see how they were exploited to juice the results. You know their approach is infeasible IRL and can clearly articulate why. Etc, etc. You folks aren't fooling anyone but fools. It's sort of like e.g. a lazy employee thinks their manager doesn't know they're slacking off like mad. As a former manager I can tell you - that is most certainly not the case, and there's no way to hide.

Tangentially relevant: Gernots list of benchmarking crimes.

https://gernot-heiser.org/benchmarking-crimes.html