51–60 of 135 posts
I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…
I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…
That's not the way science is supposed to work...
Thankfully the scientific process is incredibly resilient to nonsense, because a bad result will eventually screw up someone's future work when they come to rely on it. But it's not pretty.
I think it’s equally likely that the second version just got a different set of reviewers who randomly liked it more, and the revisions didn’t make a big difference. Having submitted lots of papers to conferences like this I basically think of the reviewer ratings as noise.
Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…
The value lies in getting true ideas in front of your eyeballs. So communicating the idea clearly is crucial to making the value available.
I am not the original author, but I posted this since it mirrors some experiences I have had in my PhD so far submitting papers. This kind of tweaking in paper and writing even happens when writing the first draft or sometimes even in the conception of the research idea or how to go about the implementation and experimentation. There is a half-joke in our lab that the more times a paper is rejected, the bigger or mor…
I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…
That's not the way science is supposed to work...
Which is why it's so funny when you see non skeptical appeals to "the god of science" which apparently exists in a vacuum of correctness and ethical purity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the way science is supposed to work...
And there's more where that came from. This particular sausage is made with tragically messed up incentives, and people will naturally always optimize the framework you put them in. Thankfully the scientific process is incredibly resilient to nonsense, because a bad result will eventually screw up someone's future work when they come to rely on it. But it's not pretty.
Not if they isolate themselves enough from the outcome but I get what you're saying.
The world progresses despite these deeply flawed institutions (corporations or academia have these perverse incentive problems and all in all, they do create some value on average).
I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…
That's not the way science is supposed to work...
The most fun in science can be had when done at home and shared with friends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is an article about ML research, and the emphasis on branding and marketing your paper wouldn't fly in any of the fields people think of as scientific The number of accepted papers is absolutely currency and measure of worth in academia.
Interestingly, one of the pieces of advice, about having a punchy title, is a double edged sword. There's some data suggesting papers with "clever" titles have an easier time getting published, but accumulate fewer lifetime citations. Both of which are currency.
I think the professional sciences has, for a long time, been a social game of building ones career but it does feel like it's metastasized into something that's swallowed academia. From the first article in the series [0]: > Insiders ... understand that a research paper serves ... in increasing importance ... Currency, An advertisement, Brand marketing ... in contrast to what outsiders .. believe, which is ... to sha…
This is an article about ML research, and the emphasis on branding and marketing your paper wouldn't fly in any of the fields people think of as scientific. Could you imagine someone saying, "be sure that the graphic for the molecule in figure 1 is 3D and has bright colors?" The most disturbing thing about it is the way advice to forget about science and optimize for the process is mixed with standard tips for good c…
> Could you imagine someone saying, "be sure that the graphic for the molecule in figure 1 is 3D and has bright colors?"
I doubt the reviewers asked for that, but yes that kind of thing happens all the time prior to publishing and there’s nothing wrong with it. If it reduces the amount of time it takes to understand the paper then do it..