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A Cornell professor’s trick for getting 1700 peer reviewed publications
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lubujackson 8y ago20 years ago, Sergey and Larry used the scientific publishing idea of tracking citations to determine document importance and built a better search engine. When people realized that links mattered more than anything, they started spamming links all over the place and the SEO battles began. Glad to see that the scientists have caught up.
- 314 8y agoThey were certainly doing it 20 years ago. I can think of a professor who was caught in my department doing exactly this. In this case, as back then, I doubt any sanctions will be taken as although the professor is cheating the system: his employer benefits from the deception.
- geofft 8y ago"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- alberto_ol 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
- sytelus 8y agoIn reality PageRank is surprisingly resistant to such effort. The SEO typically involves bit of social engineering and hacking (example convience well known website to link you or spam the comments of unpatched blog engine). The h-index, the measure used by researchers, is surprisingly gamable on other hand. For example, two researchers can buddy up and self cite each other few hundred publications in junk journals with DOI and will suddenly become the most prominent scientist of all time. It is mind boggling that even Google Scholar doesn’t use pagerank.
- InGodsName 8y agoIt was easier to trick PageRank back in time. Today, they cross validate the search results against DNS queries in a specific region and from their tracking scripts embeded in pages too. They are getting a lot of data from ISP, Wifi access points, their own 8.8.8.8 DNS service, and even their mobile operator project fi. So, even if you manage to trick the linking part, you'll not pass their other filters. It's much harder now but still doable provided someone is willing to foot the bill for such an operation.
- vanderZwan 8y agoIf you're talking about PageRank anno 2018, then you're talking about two decades worth of research fighting back against gaming SEOs. I wouldn't use say the resulting resistance is all that surprising.
- sytelus 8y agoMy point was gaming score using self citations. This is almost trivial with h-index and much more difficult with PageRank. PageRank is superior in resistance compared to h-index.
- yholio 8y agoThe graph of PageRank is fundamentally different from academic citations because it allows for cycles and that allows the algorithm to converge. Papers cannot cite future papers, so you are left with trying to value older papers from a number of newer citations of unknown quality, by essentially counting them. Until enough citations become available, the quality of the new work is usually proxied by the prestige of the journal, which in turn make these papers more wide read, influential and cited, and this perverse power drives the whole train wreck of academic publishing.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoScientists were gaming citations before SEO.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoThis article's subject does not match the practices of the field.
- shanghaiaway 8y agoHe's merely applying SEO practices. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- vixen99 8y agoNot hate but exposure for all to see.
- vanderZwan 8y agoThat's a false dichotomy
- aw3c2 8y agoHate both.
- dev_tty01 8y agoI don't understand this. The professor is acting in an unethical manner. Do you mean to say that if something is possible, it is intrinsically ethical? Perhaps I am misinterpreting your comment. He is responsible for his own actions and those actions are clearly outside the range of acceptable ethical behavior for an honorable participant in a research community. Yes, the 'game' also has issues, but that does not excuse the actions and choices of the 'player.'
- sn41 8y agoSo, mix-and-match existing papers? As a referee, I often do check whether the authors have published similar content before. The only way to beat this simple vetting is if someone pushes the same paper to multiple venues, and they all get accepted at around the same time. This is pretty unlikely. Incentives for reviewing are broken. Currently researchers have to see it as an intrinsically motivated activity for the good of the field, there are no quality checks per se.
- dagw 8y agoMore and more journals are using plagiarism detection software to test for that. My wife recently got caught 'plagiarizing' herself after she copied a paragraph of background material from a previous paper. The journal refused to send her paper out for review until she rewrote the offending section.
- blattimwind 8y agoJust self-cite?
- lmontrieux 8y agoUnfortunately, some publications use a double-blind review process, where checking whether the authors have published similar content before becomes more difficult: you'd have to figure out who the authors are first, which kind of goes against the idea of a double-blind review process. But of course, when the double-blind review process is not used, then it makes perfect sense for a reviewer to check the authors' other published work. In journals that require a certain percentage of original work, I don't see any other way.
- michaelt 8y agoIf all papers were indexed by a full-text search engine, you could simply pick a few sentences that sound unique and search for them across all publications. It's not like self-plagiarism is more important to detect than regular plagiarism :) Or journals could just submit all papers to the plagiarism-detectors used for undergraduate work, like Turnitin.
- Kyragem 8y agoGoogle scholar should filter out self citations. Google scholar hasn’t been updated in like 10 years I sometimes worry alphabet will pull it’s plug.
- Y_Y 8y agoHarvard's ADS (http://adsabs.harvard.edu http://adsabs.harvard.edu) has recently been revamped and is very effective in it's domain of (astro-)physics. Perhaps someone could base a Scholar replacement on that?
- jmmcd 8y agoYes, Google Scholar is so useful and ubiquitous that it is dangerous. It would be far preferable to have a proper open replacement for it. The technical issues are probably "easy". The ongoing maintenance costs/hassles could be solved. But the human factors would be very tricky to get right: anyone who maintained it would be under a lot of pressure in their decision-making -- your example of whether self-citations should be filtered is a good example of a decision which would have big effects and would be highly political. One good thing about Google Scholar is (was?) that we didn't worry that Google engineers would tweak it to benefit Google researchers.
- EthanHeilman 8y agoThe biggest problem with replacing google scholar is that if you are not google, publishers will threaten to sue you for crawling their website and/or displaying information about their papers on your website. If you are Google you can just counter-threaten to delist them and stop crawling their website entirely. Google is unfortunately one of the only players that can actually offer something like google scholar.
- x3tm 8y agoYes. I wonder why other fields don't use a system similar to HEP's Inspire (http://inspirehep.net/ http://inspirehep.net/) which can give informative summaries on the researchers and their contributions (e.g., http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/Lisa.Randall.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/Lisa.Randall.1 and http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&p=author:Lisa.Randall.1&of=hcs2 http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&p=author:Lisa.Randall.1&o...)
- sytelus 8y agoTLDR; a professor kept recycling his books in to perhaps 1000s of papers with identical content. It is however not clear from the article how all these went past peer reviewed publications for decades.
- coldtea 8y agoPeer reviewed publications would just care the paper on review is any good, they're not archivists to go and search for similarities. In fact in most cases they barely read the work with any substantial sense of "read". But the article mentions peers might not be getting the works either: " Bobbie Spellman, former editor of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, is confident “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Sternberg was not telling the truth when he said that “all papers in Perspectives go out for peer review, including his own introductions and discussions.” Unless, as Spellman puts it, “you believe that ‘peer review’ means asking some folks to read it and then deciding whether or not to take their advice before you approve publication of it.”"
- yiyus 8y ago> In fact in most cases they barely read the work with any substantial sense of "read". I would not say this applies to most cases. I have got many papers reviewed, have done many reviews, and have got questions from people doing other reviews, and people usually put quite some effort into it. There are exceptions, but bad reviews are not the norm, and you can usually catch them when it happens and talk with the editor about it (either if you are the author or another reviewer). Searching for similarities should indeed be part of the job, but it is not always easy, and I agree more work should be done in that aspect. This may be different in other fields or specific journals but, please, don't generalize.
- hudibras 8y agoAlthough he cited his own work many times, he didn't cite papers which were copies of the submitted paper.
- notahacker 8y ago
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- onhn 8y agothankfully arxiv.org flags articles with overlapping text: https://arxiv.org/help/overlap https://arxiv.org/help/overlap
- improbable22 8y agoAnd the great thing about this system is that it does not inform you beforehand. You cannot check whether your paper will pass, you submit, and then when v1 appears online, it is marked as "having substantial text overlap with works by other authors" etc, with links. You cannot remove this version. It will also flag overlap with your own works, but obviously it's not exactly a huge stain on your reputation if your thesis seems to borrow some paragraphs from your own papers.
- mirimir 8y agoNow that's impressive! 1700 peer-reviewed papers. Damn. A commenter asks why reviewers don't use plagiarism-detection software. With most everything online (and Sci-Hub) it'd be pretty easy.
- dagw 8y agoA commenter asks why reviewers don't use plagiarism-detection software. Many journals do these days, and won't send a paper for review unless it passes
- lisper 8y agoHoly cow! 1700 publications is one publication every week for 32 years! How could anyone see that number and not realize that it must be a scam?
- semajian 8y agoI've never seen a number that high in my field, maybe 500 or 600 for the big shots, and even that seems wildly unreasonable to me. Feynman had about 85 peer-reviewed papers over his lifetime, which is less than two per year during his career, which is a very reasonable number. Authorship and citations are basically academic currency, and as such have undergone inflation just like real currency. Professors get their name on a paper as a form of payment for future or past services to other professors (often related to funding). There's just no incentive for anyone to stop this as far as I can't tell, and appealing to ethical conduct in authorship and citations is not enough.
- nonbel 8y ago>"Authorship and citations are basically academic currency, and as such have undergone inflation just like real currency." Currencies don't just undergo inflation for no reason. Central banks create that situation on purpose to discourage saving.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoBut the method they use is printing money to move the value of money from those who had it to toward those who get the newly printed money. Same as with academics publications who do that decentralized. (Another, more-natural (Austrian), cause of inflation is a contracting economy so dollars chase fewer goods.)
- nonbel 8y agoIf publication of a new article is lowering the value of previous articles that indicates a severe dysfunction (which may indeed by the case). If understanding/knowledge is being accumulated by a field the new publications should make those that they cite even more valuable, not less like in the case of a fungible currency.
- conjectures 8y agoGetting increasingly cynical on this topic. Given the prevalance of introductions in popular media like, 'Professor X is a world renowned expert with O(1000) publications'. Which my brain translates as 'Professor X probably barely read everything with their name on it.' There are precious few exceptions to this rule unless they are very old or are Paul Erdos. I'd much rather hear 'Professor X's most important contribution was Y.'
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y agoI don't know about that. There's no doubt it happens that people artificially inflate their citations, but how often? The fact that this cases like this are reported as something exceptional says that they are, most likely, exceptional, or at least surprising for the people who point them out (which again means that they are maybe not that usual). In any case, if this kind of thing is reported in the popular press, blogs, etc, it's because a scholar caught it and reported it, which means there are checks and balances that don't let this behaviour run wild all the time. And then again, there's going to be differences between fields- some will suffer from this kind of problem more than others, etc. There's no reason to "tar everyone with the same brush".
- jimhefferon 8y agoPerhaps, though, this is a three sigma case of a common phenomenon. There are a lot of journals and I expect that they consider that a half-full issue would be bad. There are a lot of paper-writers who are rewarded for more papers.
- jononor 8y agoIf we are to believe experiments by Dan Ariely, everyone tends to cheat a little bit. It is covered in one of his books, this article seems to contain the summary. https://fs.blog/2012/05/everyone-lies-dan-ariely-explains-why/ https://fs.blog/2012/05/everyone-lies-dan-ariely-explains-wh...
- conjectures 8y agoI didn't mean to imply outright plagiarism everywhere all the time. I think there are many ways to get inflated numbers. If a PI has 3 collaborator PIs and each PI has 4 students writing a paper every three months then the PIs can get 48 publications a year. Over 20 years, there's your O(1000) publications in a model with no substantial PI time contribution. Given teaching loads, home life, university admin, academic duties like reviews I'd be surprised if a senior academic got 3 days per week to do research. I'd say at that rate the 4 first-author level contribution publications per year model would be optimistic. So a more realistic cap on the quality work someone could do in 20 years might be 80 publications.
- ancorevard 8y agoSocial sciences is an oxymoron. Problem with social sciences is not only this issue that the article points out, but that the vast majority of it is not reproduceable.
- ocfnash 8y agoMy rule of thumb is that if a subject area includes the word "science" in its title, it is less likely to follow the scientific method. Physicists don't assert that they study "physics science", nor do chemists describe their subject as "chemistry science". It's only a rule of thumb of course. There are exceptions (computer science, neuroscience, ...) but I think it works in a lot of cases: "social science", "management science", "data science", ... It's a bit like how if a country includes the word "democratic" in its title, it's less likely to be a real democracy.
- sideshowb 8y agoComputer science isn't an exception, it mostly mathematics
- ocfnash 8y agoI tend to agree, I was thinking this as I wrote the above.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- madhadron 8y ago> My rule of thumb is that if a subject area includes the word "science" in its title, it is less likely to follow the scientific method. > Physicists don't assert that they study "physics science", nor do chemists describe their subject as "chemistry science". Fortunately, most of the people in question study "economics", "psychology", "sociology", "anthropology", and so are exempt from this heuristic.
- xchip 8y agoTL;DR: The man is obsessed with citing his own work—except on the occasions when he does a cut-and-paste job, in which case he is suddenly shy about mentioning his other publications. And, as editor, he reportedly says he sends out everything for peer review, but then doesn’t.
- kelvin0 8y agoThere are rules and incentives in the 'Academia' game. Among important things: get published, get cited, get your name out there. I am cynically inclined to think the 'system' fosters this, and some people have gotten good at it. Unfortunately it's become less about 'science and knowledge' and more about getting the grants to survive and eventually be able to work on 'real' research. However I do not believe this is specific to Academia, any 'game' can be hacked (at least for some time).
- mathattack 8y agoConsidering his background of Yale, Stanford and 13 honorary PhDs spanning 4 continents (his words) I wonder how far back his gamesmanship goes.
- mathattack 8y agoFrom the professor’s website: His main research interests are in intelligence, creativity, wisdom, thinking styles, teaching and learning, love, jealousy, envy, and hate.
- ArrayList 8y agoAcademic journals hate him!
- apo 8y agoAcademics are highly incentivized to seek quantity over quality of publications. Reviewers are disincentivized from performing thorough peer review (unpaid, tangential relation of paper to area of interest, too many papers to review). This professor has simply optimized an unethical path through the broken incentive system. He's not alone by a long shot.
- potbelly83 8y agoI wonder in this day and age if a mind like John Nash would have thrived. Nash had only a handful of publications, but all of them were masterpieces. Same with Riemann.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoThey likely would get picked by super elite research orgs like IAS, or work outside the system and get grants from people like Simons. Or have a low level teaching job like that guy who proved a twin primes result a few years aago.
- Bartweiss 8y agoHas this problem infected mathematics to a significant degree? I'm sure there's still unhealthy pressure to publish for grad students, but I had the impression that it was comparatively insulated from the usual patterns and receptive to rare-but-superb work. (It's a good question, though. How would Temple Grandin or B.F. Skinner fare in psychology today?)
- jillesvangurp 8y agoPeer review is broken. The assumption with peer review is that the review filters out bad research in a fair way. The reality is that it is neither fair nor particularly effective in preventing bad research slipping through. Part of the problem is the review quality is almost as inconsistent as the article quality. From experience I can tell you that rejecting papers is a lot more work than accepting them. It requires arguing things in such a way that it survives editor scrutiny. This in turn requires actually reading the paper, doing some background checks, etc. Of course editors getting involved also means work for them. So negative reviews tend to trigger a lot of work. So much easier to just rubber stamp the reviews that give a thumbs up. And editors have the problem of needing to fill their journals with stuff. Nobody reads these things cover to cover. So, there's a lot of filler content that will never be cited that got rubber stamped by reviewers taking a five minute glance at the text. As long as the article is not too blatantly bad, nobody cares. A common practice is to invite accepted authors back as reviewers. So, there's a notion of bad articles leading to equally bad reviews. It is not surprising that there are researchers that game the system by publishing in friendly publications where the reviewers/editors are known friendly. They all need to keep their numbers up. A possible fix could be to review out in the open. Publish reviews along with the article. Allow scientists to challenge these as well. It's one thing to say "this is probably fine" anonymously than it is to say, please publish this with a message stating that I approve and endorse the content of this article.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoLike the rest of economics supply and demand, it depends on if the journal is elite and has more submissions than space (Nature) or is struggling to fill space. Also, journals catre more about important results than correct ones, until they get burned too much. But much of modern science is too hard to disprove, because the claims are too subtle and complicated.
- snarf21 8y agoI am not an insider but could the reviewer turn into more of an endorsement? Meaning the paper is published and the endorsers are listed as well, e.g. "Reviewed and endorsed by Jill Jones of Cornell University." Organizations could then have clauses that if you endorsed papers that you didn't review and test that you would lose your job. I know that seems harsh but we need to find a way to get "skin in the game". I don't think having a paid organization would work and I think having something at the government level would be worse.
- erikb 8y agoAnd for each such professor that gets discovered there are a dozen still hidden and a hundred covering each other, all of the hundred three doing the same stuff, just slightly smarter. I don't believe anymore that this stuff is a new phenomenon though. It's more like a group of people trying to discredit university these days.
- academiasucks 8y agoThere are PhD students at my school who get tasked with peer review and they hardly speak a lick of English. They don't otherwise seem that bright either...
- linkmotif 8y agoHow can I hire this guy??
- __bjoernd 8y agoI don't think this professor is exceptional, but rather the norm. As a PhD student in computer science I regularly observed people publishing papers overlapped to 80% with their previous paper. The difference being that paper 1 was titled "Solving problem X using Y" whereas the next one would be "A Y' approach to solving the X problem"
- SubiculumCode 8y agoOverlapping in topic, that is natural. Exact text, exact framing. No.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoI can tell you with certainty that this is not the norm in psychology research. You will not publish empirical articles in such a manner for any journal anyone cares about. Chapters are time consuming affairs that usually the result of an invitation from a reputable figure in the field. They will not accept a copy paste of another chapter. Usually, the editor will have requests to tailor your chapter under some theme. This Cornell professor is most likely publishing in no-name journals and books that are pay to play....just like the 1,001 spam messages in my inbox offer to me as an active researcher. That Cornell has allowed this man to continue is beyond me, but it would not be tolerate in my department. I admit I despise these articles. They take the odd case and write a story, but leaves the public thinking this is typical in science. IT IS NOT.
- nine_k 8y agoAs a software engineer, I spend comparable amounts of time writing my own code an reviewing other people's code. I think it's normal. Unlike scientists in academia, I'm explicitly (and well) paid to do both; it's in my job description. If do a sloppy job reviewing, and let a bug through, I feel the heat because something breaks. And what I work on is likely much simpler than what scientists work on.
- programmertote 8y agoBack in 2012, I worked with a guy in grad school. He was then a grad student as well--just one year senior than me. He would recruit new incoming grads to 'collaborate' with him on his current projects or whatnot. The way he operates usually goes like this: he has a hypothesis (something that is usually trivial in my opinion). Then he recruits grad or undergrad students to work with him on it. After that, he let his teammates to do all the development work (coding) and experimentation (recruiting subjects and sitting with them in the lab to run the experiments). We needed to recruit human subjects because our work was related to usability of assistive technologies. By the time the data was collected and analyzed, the guy would show up with a vague draft of the paper, in which he has liberally cited his own (and his grad school mentor's) old publications, without knowing a damn thing about what his teammates did. Then we, as his teammates who ran the experiments, fill out the experiment and results sections. He then would write up the conclusion and fill up the rest of the holes. After that, he submits the paper taking the first authorship (because he came up with the hypothesis). That's the way he was able to publish >25 papers during 5 years of grad school (until he got his PhD). Now that guy is an assistant professor--with ~50 publications--at a well-known University in one of the midwest states (of the US) at the very young age (I think he's just above 30 years old). If you look at his publications, he liberally cites himself and his mentors. Kudos to him, he knows how to play the game.
- scabarott 8y agoI'm in awe of his skills and intelligence. Sounds like someone who knows how to work smarter. I would have taken that as a learning opportunity. *edit: Getting a few down-votes on this one. I was being mildly sarcastic but on the other hand it takes some skill and smart thinking to pull this kind of thing off. Also in my experience, bull-shitting is a very valuable and necessary skill at work and in life in general. Arguably it gets you to a position where you can do work of actual substance and get recognition for it.
- badpun 8y agoIf he’s ok with doing bullshit work (as opposed to real research) just for the sake of gaming the system, why not just do it in the private sector? Is about the impressing people with a Professor title?
- headShrinker 8y agoIt's seems really pertinent to point out two other profs doing somewhat the same thing. Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay recently did an interview with Joe Rogan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlqU_JMTzd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlqU_JMTzd4 The interview is really interesting.
- jessaustin 8y agoISTM perhaps the link should be to the blog post [0] from which TFA liberally quotes? At the very least, the references to different colors of text will make more sense. Perhaps there's something "ironic" about that... [0] http://steamtraen.blogspot.com/2018/04/some-instances-of-apparent-duplicate.html http://steamtraen.blogspot.com/2018/04/some-instances-of-app...
- starchild_3001 8y agoHey, the dude published 1700 papers. Even if his repetition factor is 3 or 4, that's 400+ unique publications. Let's show some respect ;) Also, in some fields, it's acceptable to publish the same material thrice: i) conference; ii) journal; iii) book chapter, each slightly evolved or expanded or condensed or improved version of one another (ahem, I'm looking at telecommunications and signal processing).