6 ms·
Give researchers a lifetime word limit
- sunstone 9y agoYes.
- gattilorenz 9y agoIs your answer an example of the possible outcome of the proposal? Shorter papers with less content (but more frequently)?
- al452 9y agoYes.
- gtt 9y agoMore research is needed.
- slowmovintarget 9y ago1
- mmierz 9y agoPlease no. Papers are sufficiently terse, jargon-filled and hard to follow as it is
- toufka 9y agoFurther, in some fields (biomedical) research takes so long, and top-tier journals are so selective, that a lot of work just never gets published. Slowing that process even further would wreak havoc on already way-too-long graduate careers. A really pernicious effect of some bosses who 'only publish top-tier-quality work' is many students get stuck with years-worth of negative results, and do not get to either move on or publish their work.
- CJefferson 9y agoAnd that is because of the journals having limits. I've had papers where we carefully wrote a long explanation of exactly how some feature was implemented. If papers were websites, just hide it behind a link, don't read it if you don't care. Instead we were told to take it out as it wasted space.
- nextos 9y agoThis would be great because it would shake the foundations of the principal investigator model, which I think it's doing a lot of harm to research in Medicine and Biology.
- skummetmaelk 9y agoRestrict researchers to communicate using only the word "novel".
- gravypod 9y agoIf I can only use "novel" how do I talk about how "robust" my work is!?
- teddyh 9y agoWould math and/or source code count?
- Thriptic 9y agoIt's amazing how much hand wringing is done about the symptoms of problems in academia (especially life sciences) without anyone actually addressing the root causes. The reason all of these problems exist is because the space is over populated, ruthlessly competitive, and under funded. It's really that simple. Create many more professorship positions for post docs, raise the NIH, NSF, and DOD research budgets to where they should be, and all of these problems will go away. Trying to solve these problem by throttling the number of papers people can publish is putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
- T-A 9y ago"I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again." David Goodstein, "The Big Crunch" http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
- Thriptic 9y agoI had not read this before and that's a valid point, thanks for sharing. I think I would say two things to this. First, theoretically we could attack the problem from both sides. We could constrain supply in the way that med school prevents an oversupply of physicians while also increasing the total amount of resources available to those practicing science. More practically, I tend to believe that basic and translational science is a huge boon to global prosperity and also an economic engine for the United States. Ergo, if we run into the same problem down the road again, just keep raising the budget and make more positions. We have a long way to go before we exhaust the benefits of additional research, and the money we spend on research is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on other less useful ventures.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoMed school limits are a way for doctors to seize wealth from patients. The industry is reacting to their greed my moving work to nurses and PAs.
- dibujante 9y agoThe lifetime word limit should not apply to papers publishing negative results. You may all congratulate me (financially) for solving the replication crisis.
- s0rce 9y agoHah, people would find a way to hide some novel findings in an otherwise "negative result" paper and then extensively cite it in all future papers.
- conceptoriented 9y agoThe lifetime word limit is a too rigid constraint. There should be a possibility to acquire (or lose) the points you can later use for publishing your results. Then the "price" of publishing negative results could be lower than other results.
- openfuture 9y agoEarn more words via replicating. Start with enough words for one paper.
- hedora 9y agoThis is a terrible idea. Here is a better idea: - Change tenure criteria to something closer to “number of students * average quality of dissertation” - Expect fewer (0-2) but higher-quality publications from grad students applying for tenure track positions.
- canjobear 9y agoWouldn't that give people an incentive to have lots of students, thus making the PhD glut worse? I guess it depends on how the two factors are weighted.
- s0rce 9y agoI think it might be equally, if not, more important to graduate only a suitable number of students/postdocs so that the majority of those that want academic positions will find those openings available. I'm not sure how to balance these issues.
- hedora 9y agoFair point. This is a real issue in most non-engineering fields. Maybe add a “% that get a job” factor.
- s0rce 9y agoAlso, in STEM fields.
- hedora 9y agoThere’s definitely a glut in mathematics and science PhD’s. Universities keep cutting tenure track positions and cranking out more students per professor. It doesn’t hit technology and engineering as badly, since there is a steady supply of industry jobs. Some people make the jump from science and mathematics to industry, but it is harder.
- 9y ago
- KGIII 9y agoThis is a dupe but the first couple of attempts got nowhere. I left my views here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15495448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15495448
- tarboreus 9y agoI think this problem has to be tackled at the level of the journals. Journals should not reward "interesting" or catchy results with publication. Instead, experiments should be accepted for publication before they are performed, and then published regardless of result. The criterion for evaluation should be methodological rigor and proven replicability, not potential for journalistic headlines. Change the incentives and you change the outcome. If scientists are rewarded for rigor (and they currently are NOT), they will bring rigor to their experiments. If they are rewarded for cutting corners, corners they will cut.If they don't they themselves will be cut from the profession as their CVs lag behind their less scrupulous peers.
- zardo 9y agoFor every paper you publish, you must repeal two.
- crimsonalucard 9y agoI got a better idea. Force the researcher to create and submit a little mini documentary on the subject along with the paper.
- jogundas 9y agoThat's actually already done to some extent. See New Journal of Physics for example.
- widforss 9y agoOn the subject of short papers: http://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest-paper-ever-published-in-a-serious-math-journal-john-conway-alexander-soifer http://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest-paper-ever-published-in...
- qwtel 9y agoReminds me of some Warren Buffet advice on investing: Imagine you could only make 5 investments in your life. Would <your latest idea> be one of them?
- latj 9y agoNoam Chomsky.
- DominikPeters 9y ago> Lifetime limits would create a natural incentive to do research that matters. Researchers would have to ask themselves, “Is this project I’m pursuing worth the words it will cost me?” Well, researchers already have a natural time limit: everyone will die/retire. Sensible researchers ask themselves, "Is this project worth the lifetime it will cost me?" -- I don't see why a word limit would cause a substantial change in the answers to either question.
- andai 9y agoThe article jokingly mentions that papers function as a "pubcoin" allowing you to buy various benefits. What if it each researcher started out with a limited amount of a cryptocurrency, "pubcoin", which must be spent to be published? More would be awarded based on success (citations?). There is a Pareto distribution in the number of papers people write, as well as the number of citations papers get.
- hedora 9y agoThe really good papers often have few citations at first, then ramp up exponentially about a decade later. These papers advance the field 5+ years, and it takes most researchers about that long after the fact to notice massive shifts. This even happens in “fast moving” fields, like CS, where the joke about science progressing one funeral at a time still applies. That lag is enough to end a career. Superficial, but well marketed papers(republished in spammy ways) tend to have lots of citations at first, then die off, flash-in-the-pan style. The system already over-rewards those papers. The rare researchers that can produce really good papers and also market them get turing awards, etc.