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I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics. Hiring committees, gra

I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics. Hiring committees, grant selection panels etc. are a bunch of our peers doing exactly the thing that so many of us (including the people that I sit on these panels with) gripe about - judging the worth of others based on silly metrics and the journals in which they publish.

JadeNB 9y ago
> I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics. The first layer, yes, but after that come non-specialist academics, who aren't qualified to judge my particular work on its merits, and so have to substitute some other metric; and then administrators, whose fitness to judge the merits of any academic work is, let me say, not necessarily a given. For example, even without any worries of bias: as a mathematician, it is always a struggle to get non-mathematicians, even (or perhaps especially) other scientists, to realise that author order on mathematicians' papers reflects only one's place in the alphabet, not one's contribution.
- austinjp 9y ago
  Author order is such an arcane nonsense, and needs to be dismantled. The "roles" indicated by position are peculiar to the discipline and a mystery outside it. The customary position of senior academics e.g. as the "anchor" can confer significant prestige on that academic, while their contribution might be minimal (and even zero, in exploitative situations). It really is bewildering. Online academic communities and publishers such as ResearchGate and EndNote could come up with potential solutions here. ResearchGate already asks us to effectively vote about other users' authorship and expertise. Adding a voting system (or similar) whereby users declare the roles played by each author might help dismantle author position hegemony. Voting might be imperfect, and perhaps there are other options. The current system, though, is ridiculous and contributes towards the exploitation of junior academics, and poor inter-discipline communication. Clearer computational representation of roles could also improve search.

JadeNB 9y ago

> I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics. The first layer, yes, but after that come non-specialist academics, who aren't qualified to judge my particular work on its merits, and so have to substitute some other metric; and then administrators, whose fitness to judge the merits of any academic work is, let me say, not necessarily a given. For example, even without any worries of bias: as a mathematician, it is always a struggle to get non-mathematicians, even (or perhaps especially) other scientists, to realise that author order on mathematicians' papers reflects only one's place in the alphabet, not one's contribution.

austinjp 9y ago
Author order is such an arcane nonsense, and needs to be dismantled. The "roles" indicated by position are peculiar to the discipline and a mystery outside it. The customary position of senior academics e.g. as the "anchor" can confer significant prestige on that academic, while their contribution might be minimal (and even zero, in exploitative situations). It really is bewildering. Online academic communities and publishers such as ResearchGate and EndNote could come up with potential solutions here. ResearchGate already asks us to effectively vote about other users' authorship and expertise. Adding a voting system (or similar) whereby users declare the roles played by each author might help dismantle author position hegemony. Voting might be imperfect, and perhaps there are other options. The current system, though, is ridiculous and contributes towards the exploitation of junior academics, and poor inter-discipline communication. Clearer computational representation of roles could also improve search.