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Academia has the most severe hierarchical system out there. There is also an insane amount of unjustified credentialism. Unjustified because so much depends on
by shas3 11y ago
Academia has the most severe hierarchical system out there. There is also an insane amount of unjustified credentialism. Unjustified because so much depends on luck that things like "swoon that researcher published in PNAS" are misguided. I actually heard someone doing basic science in an elite school say this, "That guy's research is garbage, he publishes in Nature Scientific Reports, which is a junk journal compared to Nature and Science where we publish."
Then there's basic science people shitting on engineering, which is probably one of the dumbest forms of elitism I've encountered.
And, there is the most significant hierarchy of all: which university you are affiliated with. Academics who hit it big in the tenure track job hunt quickly forget the role of luck in deciding which university hires them and shit on folks from lower ranked universities.
Frankly, the capitalist structure of industry discourages these kinds of hierarchies with egalitarian targets like revenue (and schmoozing) deciding your worth than other things.
- _delirium 11y agoI haven't found academia exceptionally hierarchical in computer science (though I'm not full-time in it at the moment). Even quite famous people tend to be pretty accessible, people take your talks at conferences seriously regardless of what university you come from, etc. There is definitely some hierarchy, but if anything it's precisely because of the "capitalist structure" you mention, which big universities are definitely not immune to. There are some power differentials especially around money, with grad students needing to work for a well-funded lab to get paid, which gives power to professors who have lots of money (depending on the area, that usually comes from either grants or corporate funding). In fact at AI conferences, the non-academics are way more hierarchical about academia than the people actually in academia are. Journalists, investors, recruiters, and industry consultants who show up to a conference like AAAI or ICML seem to really care about people's pedigrees, especially impressed by names like MIT and Stanford. Professors are more likely to choose what talks to go to based on sub-area, talk title, or knowing a specific person, rather than going by institutional affiliation.
- shas3 11y agoI have hovered in EE, CS, and math circles. I find CS and math to be made up of more genuinely curious folks than EE. But this comment and my parent comment are just a few points of observations, too few to generalize from. But, once you get into the grants and peer review game, connections and credentials, unfortunately, matter a lot. It is not explicit in that no one says "hey you are from XYZ university, hence I am rejecting your paper." What happens commonly is that for peer-reviewers opinions are colored by your credentials. My hypothesis is this: if one were to control for quality of paper, a credentialed or pedigreed author's paper is likelier to get accepted than the non-credentialed ones. There are many exceptions and there are deliberate programs like EPSCOR (for grants) to prevent such things from happening, but the inequality exists nonetheless. The inequality is sometimes justified, sometimes not.
- pgbovine 11y agoI obviously can't speak for other fields, but at least in my field, "peer review" means that the people reviewing your papers are from all kinds of academic (and sometimes industry) settings; it's not like it's just a bunch of MIT professors criticizing all submissions and discriminating based on the authors' credentials. For instance, here is a program committee that I'm on right now for a top conference in my sub-field ... you can see for yourself which institutions people come from: http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2016/committees.html http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2016/committees.html The chances of your paper being reviewed exclusively by "top credential" people (whatever that means) is astonishingly low; reviewers come from all sorts of institutions around the world. Even if someone exhibited an "elitist" opinion in discussions, they would be summarily shot down by the majority of people on the committee, who are not from top-ranked institutions. Again, N=small personal anecdotes, but in paper/grant review meetings I've sat on, I've never seen this to be an issue simply because most members are not from top-ranked institutions. The same is true for NSF grant reviewing in the U.S.. Again, different funding agencies have different models, but the NSF is a peer-based model just like papers.
- shas3 11y ago
- mirimir 11y agoThe swoon about PNAS is that you can't publish there unless recommended by a member. Peer review there is actually pretty iffy.
- leemailll 11y agoSomehow it is true scientific reports is a "junk" journal,especially compared with science or nature
- argonaut 11y agoBut Nature Scientific Reports is junk compared to Nature. It's not actually a junk journal, but it's a huge step below Nature or Science. It's an open access journal that charges $$$ and explicitly only reviews papers for technical validity (e.g. making sure you made no errors). It does not judge papers based on whether they are interesting, impactful, useful, or whether papers actually make a meaningful contribution to the field. The hard part about research isn't getting something technically correct. It's about getting something meaningful that advances the field.
- shas3 11y agoThat's begging the question. The argument for PLOS and Scientific Reports is that in an age where there are no constraints on size of journals, number of papers in a journal, effort required to sift through papers, etc. selecting for impact is less important than before. Then again, this is not a certain conclusion and there is a lot of room for debate. With extensive searching on Scholar, etc. I Find lesser and lesser need for the stamp of Nature/Science/etc. to certify a paper as high impact.
- argonaut 11y agoHow is that begging the question? You didn't say. Look, you're making a normative statement, and that's fine. It does not address at all the fact that Nature/Science is seen as hugely more prestigious in the scientific community.