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The statement in the original article linked is more interesting: “In the few experiments a decade ago where publication would have been possible, academic jou
by new299 8y ago
The statement in the original article linked is more interesting:
“In the few experiments a decade ago where publication would have been possible, academic journals refused to do so for reasons having nothing to do with the scientific quality of the work. Computer-science publications refused to publish re-identification experiments unless the paper also included a technological solution, notwithstanding assertions that publishing these experiments would inspire technological innovation to address the real-world problem. Health-policy publications refused to publish re-identification experiments related to health data from fear that reaction might make data sharing more difficult, despite assertions that because technology was fostering unprecedented levels of data-sharing, it was timely to scientifically re-examine data-sharing practices. Even my Weld example and related demographic analyses, despite making significant contributions to privacy regulations worldwide, were refused publication by more than 20 academic publications at the time.”
Personally if feels like the work was an important journalistic effort, but its scientific merit is less clear.
- dash2 8y agoThat's not how I would read it. Instead, the article fell between the gaps between two different disciplines. The computer science guys wanted a tech fix - reasonably enough, that's kind of what computer science is about. The health policy guys' reaction is harder to understand: they didn't want to publish it because they feared the consequences of publicity, rather than because of flaws in the methods. That's almost never a legitimate reason to reject a paper.
- new299 8y agoThat’s what the author said, but it seems suspect to me. I’d like to read the rejections and understand if this is just the authors interpretation. But looking at what was done, it doesn’t seem novel. It’s just combining two datasets, and while journalistically important, doesn’t seem to be sufficiently novel for publication in most journals.
- naasking 8y ago> doesn’t seem to be sufficiently novel for publication in most journals. The question is why you think novelty is relevant. Replication studies aren't novel but are critically important to real science. Novelty is not and should not be mandatory.
- new299 8y agoMaybe, but it generally is. In most scientific disciplines I think you’d find it hard to publish simple replication of someone else’s work. You’d need to add some novel aspect, or extend the work slightly. For a healthcare replication study, I would guess you be hard pressed to get a replication study published for the same demographic, and same sample size as a previous study.
- naasking 8y ago> I think you’d find it hard to publish simple replication of someone else’s work. Yes, but this shouldn't be the case. The replication crisis clearly points out the problems with this.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago> the article fell between the gaps between two different disciplines This is exactly right - Dr Sweeney went on to cofound a PhD program at CMU focused on this intersection, called "Computation, Organizations and Society". It's not just that policy folks aren't tech literate and that applied cs folks don't know law -- there are interesting technical results that evince at the intersection, like differential privacy frameworks and mechanism design. A challenge of this kind of work is that it's difficult to prove generality or prediction power, because you are studying distributed systems that don't repeat themselves. Economists and sociologists are used to this problem, but it's hard to intersect with the more technical applied sciences that you would like to vet the work. So most practitioners have to pick one side or the other (hard vs "soft" communities) one publication at a time.
- mcguire 8y agoThis is almost certainly a health and research policy issue. Any of the journals that do cover policy should be interested: Science or Nature for example. You can't solve a problem without discovering what the problem is.