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There is definitely an argument to be made for increased negative (reputational) effects. However, many unreproducable results are only discovered years, if not
by itcrowd 7y ago
There is definitely an argument to be made for increased negative (reputational) effects. However, many unreproducable results are only discovered years, if not decades, after initial publication. This makes the discovery less impactfull for the original researchers. In that timespan, many have left academia; others have more recent "shiny" publications to point to instead. It's sad, but in addition to the publish-or-perish, there's also a publish-and-forget mentality in (some) academia, in which your project is finished and you move on to the next "hot" topic. Therefore, my concern is with the efficacy of such measures. What are your thoughts on how to implement such a reputational effect? Public shaming? Should we register fraudulentprofessor.com?
> Professors aren't doing any favors by rubberstamping weak papers, or giving weak students PhD's
Agreed. However, I think this is a sort of tragedy of the commons, in which "good" behavior of some professors will not stop the onslaught of "bad" behavior of others. Certainly the good ones will be outnumbered in terms of graduates and since university performance reviews rely mostly on sheer numbers (students, papers..), there is an argument to be made that universities self-select for the rubber-stamp professor over the honest ones.
I feel a fair solution is to re-imagine the universities' performance review system, although I have a hard time coming up with concrete and good measures of how to select the good from the bad professors.
- javajosh 7y ago>What are your thoughts on how to implement such a reputational effect? I think it should be similar to how journalists are treated after they are involved in a major scandal (usually reporting something speculative as fact). Personally, I don't think there's any excuse for unreproducible results. They are worse than silence, they are lies that spread other lies.
- itcrowd 7y ago(To continue your journalist analogy) So what happens to "the journalist" when something speculative is reported in a newspaper piece that is written by 7 people five years ago? In addition, five of the seven writers are now working different jobs in the private sector, no longer writing in any newspaper.
- ShorsHammer 7y agoNothing happens in journalism much like in science and in many other fields like disgraced police officers who end up climbing the ladder still. Case in point: Michael Riley who wrote Bloomberg's thoroughly debunked story on SuperMicro "The Big Hack", has now been promoted to manage all of the their cybersecurity coverage.