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Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

jacobbuckman.com

11–20 of 121 posts

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#11
"For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud? [...] But the mere possibility that any given paper was published through fraud forces people to engage more skeptically with all published work."

Well... spending a few weeks reproducing a shiny conference paper that simply doesn't work and is easily beaten by any classical baseline will do that to you in the first few months of your PhD imo. I've become so skeptic over the years that I assume almost all papers to be lies until proven otherwise.

"This surfaces the fundamental tension between good science and career progression buried deep at the heart of academia. Most researchers are to some extent “career researchers”, motivated by the power and prestige that rewards those who excel in the academic system, rather than idealistic pursuit of scientific truth."

For the first years of my PhD I simply refused to parttake in the subtle kinds of frauud listed in the second paragraph of the post. As a result, I barely had any publications worth mentioning. Mostly papers shared with others, where I couldn't stop the paper from happening by the time I realized that there is too little substance for me to be comfortable with it.

As a result, my publication history looks sad and my carreer looks nothing like I wished it would.

Now, a few years later, I've become much better at research and can now get my papers to the point where I'm comfortable submitting them with a straight face. I've also came to terms with overselling something that does have substance, just not as much as I wish it had.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#12

I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to the point of "considerable at all" came from me. It was a chair which normally prouded itself of only publishing in the most highly regarded journals of its field (internally graded A, B, C). They had a few years without viable paper. Desperate to publish. From my POV this was a D. The pape…

If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses.

I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discarded when it broke their predefined conclusion.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#13

I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to the point of "considerable at all" came from me. It was a chair which normally prouded itself of only publishing in the most highly regarded journals of its field (internally graded A, B, C). They had a few years without viable paper. Desperate to publish. From my POV this was a D. The pape…

I have a similar experience. We had a truly terrible paper written as a collaboration with a team from the US on a software project, integrating their "novel" and "innovative" component. The component took 1 hour to compile, the architecture made no sense, and the US professor constantly talked about nothing but high-flying marketing concepts. I managed to hack together a demo using their component, fixing build bugs and design flaws (the ones I could do something about).

The proof of concept worked, but it wasn't doing anything new. We were just doing what we used to do, but now this terrible component was involved in it, making everything slower and more complicated.

Somehow that became a paper, and somehow this paper passed review without a single comment (my feeling is it's because of the professor's name recognition). I'm ashamed to have my name on that paper.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#14
> Submitting a paper to a conference because it’s got a decent shot at acceptance and you don’t want the time you spent on it go to waste, even though you’ve since realized that the core ideas aren’t quite correct.

I don't see a problem with this? If papers are the vehicle for conference entries why shouldn't authors submit it just because it's wrong? Conferences are for discussion. So go there and discuss it... "My paper says XYZ, but since I wrote it I realised ABC" - sounds like a good talk to me?

(Naivety check: I am not an academic)

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#16

I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to the point of "considerable at all" came from me. It was a chair which normally prouded itself of only publishing in the most highly regarded journals of its field (internally graded A, B, C). They had a few years without viable paper. Desperate to publish. From my POV this was a D. The pape…

As a co-author are you not able to do so?

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#17
post #8

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…

This was the major upside to taking a seminar class where we read papers and discuss them. The prof tried to highlight some of these points. Not just seeing the graphs that are there but also the graphs they could have added but didn't.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#18
(2021)

Together, we can force the community to reckon with its own shortcomings, and develop stronger, better, and more scientific norms. It is a harsh treatment, to be sure – a chemotherapy regimen that risks destroying us entirely. But this is our best shot at destroying the cancer that has infected our community.

And now, nearly 4 years later, research funding gets DOGE'd...

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#19
post #10

Tangentially relevant: Gernots list of benchmarking crimes. https://gernot-heiser.org/benchmarking-crimes.html

Ha, I thought this would be a really useful resource but I think the people the author is complaining about do much better than most benchmarking I see in the industry

Almost all the benchmarking results I see is just a percentage difference between two algebraic means, no statistical analysis whatsoever.

Very common interaction: QA folks say "your change degraded some of our metrics and improved some others". I know they are full of shit because it's impossible that my change improved any perf metrics. I ask for statistical details, they don't have any, this meeting was a waste of time, it will be next time too.

The fact that I get these reactions suggests that everyone else just lets each other get away with it.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#20
post #12

I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to the point of "considerable at all" came from me. It was a chair which normally prouded itself of only publishing in the most highly regarded journals of its field (internally graded A, B, C). They had a few years without viable paper. Desperate to publish. From my POV this was a D. The pape…

If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses. I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discar…

When research is just means to an end...

I think as children if we are taught what earning a living means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes to research people should know that perhaps money will not be great.

It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as children, we follow our passions (or we follow cool passions) and then realise that money is also important and then resort to unethical means to get that money. Let's be transparent about hard fields with children so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into.

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