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Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

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Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#101

Post by anonymouskimmer »

UncleMeat wrote: post #90
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Well, he also decided it was appropriate to insult the physical appearance of grad students on twitter who disagreed with him. He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.

Passion is fine and great in all endeavors. Not being able to acknowledge when you are wrong in small or large is the problem. And it's a problem for both passionate and dispassionate people.

One of the earlier researchers on psychopaths was Hervey M. Cleckley. In his book on the topic The Mask of Sanity one of his vignettes of, I believe, "incomplete manifestation of psychopathology" was of a psychologist who gave public lectures on psychopaths, without apparently recognizing that he was almost one of them.

To sum up the parallel, there are two kinds of people who tend to talk the most about any social or personal ill: those who are worried about the ill, and those who are distracting from the fact that they themselves embody it. (Technically this probably overlaps a bit, as ex-alcoholics are often worried about alcoholism, for example.)

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#102

Post by culebron21 »

I've read a huge book [1] of a broad research on universities in different countries, and this is what the book told.

Science metrics, when used to determine scientific significance by government officials, become abused. This law was articulated back in 1920s, if I remember correctly. And this is one of the cases.

Science was not like this until quite recently -- citation metrics were first used in the 1980s by neoliberal government of the UK (because those in the libertarian political spectrum tend to distrust public sector and love _efficiency_).

The idea behind the use of citation ratings was to determine more efficient universities and support them. According to recent studies, this hasn't changed the hierarchy of universities in the UK -- it preserved it and actually made more rigid.

As a side effect, there's this publications race.

Still, British academia is rather modest in ratings: it only uses them to evaluate all university or a faculty. In countries that are trying to catch up in science, metrics are applied at the level of an individual researcher, and make bonuses or position depend on it. They demand a certain lever of a citation index, and demand papers published in journals no lower than Nth quartile in some ranking.

This basically means you must abandon teaching, join as co-author on as many papers as possible. If one makes any good research, they usually split it into several papers over couple of years -- because bonuses.

Some join so-called citation cartels, and this is probably one of them.

[1] https://ecsoc.hse.ru/en/2016-17-4/192208750.html

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#103

Post by dalbasal »

version_five wrote: post #9

I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and organizing the research as well as challenging the results and strengthening the presentation of th…

Above board, perhaps.

This way of researching and publish does, OTOH, mean something quite different from science of the past. This isn't applying the method more efficiently. It's applying a different method.

Reading old papers, you know who they were written by. These days, authorship doesn't mean that anymore. It's more like credits in a movie than a signature on a painting.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#104

Post by anonymouskimmer »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #99
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

How well informed is Random Undergrad Co-Author? And why should being informed on something lead to an authorship? To relate again to material purchases, often enough researchers ask the commercial tech support for details on using the equipment or reagents. This still doesn't make the tech support person a co-author.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#107

Post by sfpotter »

version_five wrote: post #39
throw_pm23 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a similar group a decade ago. At the time, I found it impressive and efficient, but looking back now, I find much of those papers not to amount to much. I wonder what your experience is: were those 30 papers per year good science overall?

I think they followed a bell curve. They were all legitimate science - I don't pretend that this was a world leading lab, but it was a decent one and we mostly published in the field's main few journals. I don't believe the volume had any negative impact on the quality, if anything it made it better because metrics being what they are we had good grant money coming in and got good people and equipment. And as the sib…

What field?

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#110

Post by borroka »

dylan604 wrote: post #100
borroka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repe…

You are referring to the publication of "negative results", which are of course informative, although rarely published due to a bias shown by journal editors and scientists themselves towards "positive results", that is results supporting the hypothesis tested. Negative results are published, yes, but in the context of popular or highly contested hypotheses or models. That's valuable research.

Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers testing hypotheses nobody is interested about, theoretical work that looks like more abstract art than science, p-hacking, work that starts with corrupted, unreliable, badly collected data, and so on. Work that has no value other than that provided to the authors by the fact that they have produced a piece of "scientific currency".

I must say that at least 1/3 of my conspicuous scientific output was of very limited value. Unfortunately, I cannot go back in time and spend my valuable time and energy on more valuable research.

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