5 ms·

I think that is something worth investigating - because if it is true that 50% of all papers written never get an audience, then I would see that as a pretty ma

by veddox 10y ago

I think that is something worth investigating - because if it is true that 50% of all papers written never get an audience, then I would see that as a pretty major flaw in the way we do science. (As if we don't have enough of those already...) I mean, many people having been saying for years now that the scientific community is much too focused on churning out papers, but this would take things a step further by saying that all those extra papers are essentially useless. And if they are indeed useless, then they represent a phenomenal waste of time and money that needs to be stopped ASAP. (Personally I doubt those numbers, but I have no hard evidence to back that up.)

Swizec 10y ago
> saying that all those extra papers are essentially useless Having a deliverable is useful. It focuses your efforts, provides clarity of thought, and gives you a target. It's often that only when explaining something we realize we don't understand the thing. Even papers nobody but the author reads are useful.
- veddox 10y ago
  > Even papers nobody but the author reads are useful. But to a very, very limited extent. Why do we publish papers? Because we want to share the knowledge we generate. Papers are the very essence of the ideal of open science - science that is accessible not just to the people who did the work, or those who paid for it, but (in theory) to everyone. Papers are there to communicate information, but communication always requires a recipient as well as a sender. Ergo, if our papers aren't being read, there is no recipient, there is no communication: our papers have failed their most basic raison d'etre. And because they are our most important method of communicating, you could say that open science itself has failed. Yes, there is a value in writing up your thoughts and results just for yourself. But then why go through the hassle of publishing? Why waste paper and ink (in a printed journal); and more importantly, why waste the time of the reviewers, editors and typesetters involved in the process?
  - kardos 10y ago
    Let's not forget that all of these papers passed review, meaning the reviewers/editor felt it made a contribution to the field. Also, just because it didn't get read right away doesn't mean it's a failure. Ask some gray haired academics how often they've seen (first hand or otherwise) an obscure paper from decades ago become key in solving a modern problem.
    - veddox 10y ago
      > Also, just because it didn't get read right away doesn't mean it's a failure. Ask some gray haired academics how often they've seen (first hand or otherwise) an obscure paper from decades ago become key in solving a modern problem. True, but don't tell me that all of nearly a million unread papers published this year (accepting the Smithsonianmag's figures as true, for the moment) are going to solve a key problem of science in 50 years...
      - grzm 10y ago
        Very likely not all :) How do you figure out which of the nearly a million are the useful ones?
      - kardos 10y ago
        Unread and uncited are very different things. It appears that the 50% number is some sort of arbitrary (short?) time scale "has it been cited yet" metric. Citing something is much harder than reading; you need to do some research, write it up and go through the publishing process. If 200 people read a paper but not cite it, is it a failure?
        dragandj 10y ago
        I am pretty sure that the vast majority of cited papers have not been read by the people who cite them.
        eli_gottlieb 10y ago
- nitwit005 10y ago
  Sure, but then you don't need to go through the whole process of publishing it. You could just post it on your blog.
kardos 10y ago
> if it is true that 50% of all papers written never get an audience This can not be assessed. Even if you could somehow determine whether a paper was read or not, how long after publication do you wait until you declare it "never read"?
- Shoop 10y ago
  If it's not read in even a year or two, I think that can still be considered a failure.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - azhenley 10y ago
    That is far too shortsighted.
    - falkenb0t 10y ago
      Yeah, especially when you consider all the current buzz about Neural Networks. The original papers on MLPs, CNNs, etc were published more than two decades ago but were not given much attention until recently. And I certainly wouldn't consider that a failure. I'm sure there are other examples of research catching on decades later.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Many of the most important advances in science are ignored for decades. To take one well known example, Mendel’s work on breeding of pea plants was published in the 1860s in an obscure journal and completely ignored by biologists at the time, but was rediscovered and popularized 40+ years later and now forms the foundation of the modern understanding of genetics.
feral 10y ago
'I know half the money I spent on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half.' A lot of research is supposed to be new, uncertain, high-risk, high-reward. So it should fail often. [A lot is also to be meticulous fact-checking, building certainty to later build new breakthroughs on.] IMO, there is a real problem with people doing bad research they know is bad, but I wouldn't say that the 50% unread figure is the thing to focus on.
- veddox 10y ago
  Your quote is thought-provoking, but I do not quite follow the rest of your argumentation: > A lot of research is supposed to be new, uncertain, high-risk, high-reward. So it should fail often. Setting aside the question of whether or not science ought to be the way you describe it, what do you mean by research "failing"? IMO, there are two levels on which research can fail. The first (and I get the impression that you are describing this type) is the failure of some new theory to be corroborated by the facts, or the failure of a new approach to fulfill its promises, or a later experiment contradicting an earlier one. But this is part and parcel of the scientific method. In fact, this leads to an advancement of science, as we then know which explanation is not correct, or which observations need more detailed scrutiny. And so, such a failure of research is actually a success of science. However, this scientific process is based on scientists exchanging their findings freely so that they can cross-check each other. Thus, the second and much greater failing of research would be to fail to communicate itself. And that is exactly what (appears) to be happening. If scientists aren't reading what their colleagues publish, that is not a failure of research - the research itself might be fantastic, but if nobody reads it, who is going to know? This is not a failure of research, this is a failure of science. And that is a much more serious issue altogether.
  - feral 10y ago
    >whether or not science ought to be the way you describe it, I'm assuming a charitable readership - but its frequently stated, and I agree, that industry is for high value things we know will work, science/research/academia is geared for less certain / more speculative projects difficult to commercialise yet. > If scientists aren't reading what their colleagues publish, that is not a failure of research Well, maybe? Or maybe the paper authors hoped the results would be amazing, but they were only mediocre [research issue]; but they decided they might as well publish after getting the results (which is good), and some people skimmed the abstract; but it wasn't as interesting to others as the authors hoped (diverse perspectives; good); or the whole field went a different direction; or the specific competition found a better technique/result in the interim [research issue] and got all the love. That's all just how research goes - doesn't mean anyone is failing to communicate necessarily. > This is not a failure of research, this is a failure of science. Maybe; maybe not. I agree there's lots of problems in science, but based on my limited experience, I'd expect and think its OK for lots of stuff to be unread; lots of dead ends. Lots of startups should fail too, that's not a bad thing; its like there's simply a high bayes error. IMO real failure is things like people making up data, or doing research they know is bunk (maybe they hacked their p-values or left out data, or something) or continuing research they discovered is useless but their Adviser is politically wedded to etc.
CJefferson 10y ago
One problem is measuring what we mean by "paper". I can quite believe this is we include all the fake journals, which feature huge numbers of junk papers. By the same argument, 99% of webpages are never visited by anyone but bots, but that isn't a "crisis of the internet", just a lot of junk. It would be nice (and I don't know how) to provide a clearer division between junk and real journals -- I now basically ignore all new journals, unless I know someone involved personally (either as editor, or author). That's the only way I can stay sane, but it doesn't seem like a good system.
- veddox 10y ago
  Good point. Unfortunately, the links in the Smithsonianmag's article are broken and they don't provide much other information to find the original papers that reported this, so I don't know how the authors worked. Would be interesting to see which sample they took. [Edit] I found the original papers (see above), but unfortunately the relevant one is closed-access...
thaw13579 10y ago
It depends on the journal and not all journals are equal, e.g. every Nature paper has been widely read.

by veddox 10y ago

Swizec 10y ago

> saying that all those extra papers are essentially useless Having a deliverable is useful. It focuses your efforts, provides clarity of thought, and gives you a target. It's often that only when explaining something we realize we don't understand the thing. Even papers nobody but the author reads are useful.

veddox 10y ago
> Even papers nobody but the author reads are useful. But to a very, very limited extent. Why do we publish papers? Because we want to share the knowledge we generate. Papers are the very essence of the ideal of open science - science that is accessible not just to the people who did the work, or those who paid for it, but (in theory) to everyone. Papers are there to communicate information, but communication always requires a recipient as well as a sender. Ergo, if our papers aren't being read, there is no recipient, there is no communication: our papers have failed their most basic raison d'etre. And because they are our most important method of communicating, you could say that open science itself has failed. Yes, there is a value in writing up your thoughts and results just for yourself. But then why go through the hassle of publishing? Why waste paper and ink (in a printed journal); and more importantly, why waste the time of the reviewers, editors and typesetters involved in the process?
- kardos 10y ago
  Let's not forget that all of these papers passed review, meaning the reviewers/editor felt it made a contribution to the field. Also, just because it didn't get read right away doesn't mean it's a failure. Ask some gray haired academics how often they've seen (first hand or otherwise) an obscure paper from decades ago become key in solving a modern problem.
  - veddox 10y ago
    > Also, just because it didn't get read right away doesn't mean it's a failure. Ask some gray haired academics how often they've seen (first hand or otherwise) an obscure paper from decades ago become key in solving a modern problem. True, but don't tell me that all of nearly a million unread papers published this year (accepting the Smithsonianmag's figures as true, for the moment) are going to solve a key problem of science in 50 years...
    - grzm 10y ago
      Very likely not all :) How do you figure out which of the nearly a million are the useful ones?
    - kardos 10y ago
      Unread and uncited are very different things. It appears that the 50% number is some sort of arbitrary (short?) time scale "has it been cited yet" metric. Citing something is much harder than reading; you need to do some research, write it up and go through the publishing process. If 200 people read a paper but not cite it, is it a failure?
      - dragandj 10y ago
        I am pretty sure that the vast majority of cited papers have not been read by the people who cite them.
        eli_gottlieb 10y ago
nitwit005 10y ago
Sure, but then you don't need to go through the whole process of publishing it. You could just post it on your blog.

kardos 10y ago

> if it is true that 50% of all papers written never get an audience This can not be assessed. Even if you could somehow determine whether a paper was read or not, how long after publication do you wait until you declare it "never read"?

Shoop 10y ago
If it's not read in even a year or two, I think that can still be considered a failure.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- azhenley 10y ago
  That is far too shortsighted.
  - falkenb0t 10y ago
    Yeah, especially when you consider all the current buzz about Neural Networks. The original papers on MLPs, CNNs, etc were published more than two decades ago but were not given much attention until recently. And I certainly wouldn't consider that a failure. I'm sure there are other examples of research catching on decades later.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Many of the most important advances in science are ignored for decades. To take one well known example, Mendel’s work on breeding of pea plants was published in the 1860s in an obscure journal and completely ignored by biologists at the time, but was rediscovered and popularized 40+ years later and now forms the foundation of the modern understanding of genetics.

feral 10y ago

'I know half the money I spent on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half.' A lot of research is supposed to be new, uncertain, high-risk, high-reward. So it should fail often. [A lot is also to be meticulous fact-checking, building certainty to later build new breakthroughs on.] IMO, there is a real problem with people doing bad research they know is bad, but I wouldn't say that the 50% unread figure is the thing to focus on.

veddox 10y ago
Your quote is thought-provoking, but I do not quite follow the rest of your argumentation: > A lot of research is supposed to be new, uncertain, high-risk, high-reward. So it should fail often. Setting aside the question of whether or not science ought to be the way you describe it, what do you mean by research "failing"? IMO, there are two levels on which research can fail. The first (and I get the impression that you are describing this type) is the failure of some new theory to be corroborated by the facts, or the failure of a new approach to fulfill its promises, or a later experiment contradicting an earlier one. But this is part and parcel of the scientific method. In fact, this leads to an advancement of science, as we then know which explanation is not correct, or which observations need more detailed scrutiny. And so, such a failure of research is actually a success of science. However, this scientific process is based on scientists exchanging their findings freely so that they can cross-check each other. Thus, the second and much greater failing of research would be to fail to communicate itself. And that is exactly what (appears) to be happening. If scientists aren't reading what their colleagues publish, that is not a failure of research - the research itself might be fantastic, but if nobody reads it, who is going to know? This is not a failure of research, this is a failure of science. And that is a much more serious issue altogether.
- feral 10y ago
  >whether or not science ought to be the way you describe it, I'm assuming a charitable readership - but its frequently stated, and I agree, that industry is for high value things we know will work, science/research/academia is geared for less certain / more speculative projects difficult to commercialise yet. > If scientists aren't reading what their colleagues publish, that is not a failure of research Well, maybe? Or maybe the paper authors hoped the results would be amazing, but they were only mediocre [research issue]; but they decided they might as well publish after getting the results (which is good), and some people skimmed the abstract; but it wasn't as interesting to others as the authors hoped (diverse perspectives; good); or the whole field went a different direction; or the specific competition found a better technique/result in the interim [research issue] and got all the love. That's all just how research goes - doesn't mean anyone is failing to communicate necessarily. > This is not a failure of research, this is a failure of science. Maybe; maybe not. I agree there's lots of problems in science, but based on my limited experience, I'd expect and think its OK for lots of stuff to be unread; lots of dead ends. Lots of startups should fail too, that's not a bad thing; its like there's simply a high bayes error. IMO real failure is things like people making up data, or doing research they know is bunk (maybe they hacked their p-values or left out data, or something) or continuing research they discovered is useless but their Adviser is politically wedded to etc.

CJefferson 10y ago

One problem is measuring what we mean by "paper". I can quite believe this is we include all the fake journals, which feature huge numbers of junk papers. By the same argument, 99% of webpages are never visited by anyone but bots, but that isn't a "crisis of the internet", just a lot of junk. It would be nice (and I don't know how) to provide a clearer division between junk and real journals -- I now basically ignore all new journals, unless I know someone involved personally (either as editor, or author). That's the only way I can stay sane, but it doesn't seem like a good system.

veddox 10y ago
Good point. Unfortunately, the links in the Smithsonianmag's article are broken and they don't provide much other information to find the original papers that reported this, so I don't know how the authors worked. Would be interesting to see which sample they took. [Edit] I found the original papers (see above), but unfortunately the relevant one is closed-access...

thaw13579 10y ago

It depends on the journal and not all journals are equal, e.g. every Nature paper has been widely read.