6 ms·
Why professors are writing crap that nobody reads
- rosstex 6y agoThis was debunked: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306312714535679 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063127145356...
- disqard 6y agoThe article you linked to, does not appear to debunk the thesis mentioned in TFA, namely, most academic papers are never read by anyone other than the author(s) and the reviewers.
- geofft 6y agoThe thesis in TFA is "82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once." This claim is unsourced, but it's the same form of claim that's debunked by the linked article (once you scroll past the stuff about spinach): "The main problem with the 45 percent figure is not that we have to work hard in order to find out where it comes from, nor that it is old and rather irrelevant for the situation in 2012. We have in fact stumbled across yet another academic urban legend."
- asdf_snar 6y agoI don't see how the article you linked is relevant to the question of whether or not most academic papers are widely read. That being said, the original article is poorly sourced and poorly written.
- geofft 6y agoScroll down to "An avalanche of low-quality research?".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ogogmad 6y agoI think if you want people to learn about a subject, it's probably better to edit Wikipedia than to write books or papers on it. It's the first (and last) place most people look.
- voidhorse 6y agoYeah, but there's a huge difference between publishing bleeding edge research that may still have fluctuating epistemic status and publishing literature reviews/overviews/surveys of the core foundations of particular fields that are well-studied and proven. Most academic journals publish the former, not the latter. Academics are typically publishing research they think will push their fields forward some day or illuminate something as of yet misunderstood. These papers typically require lots of subject area knowledge about the current cutting edge research and landscape of very specialized fields--thus partly explaining the low readership. I think it'd be a mistake to try to jam everything, especially theories or results for which the jury is still out, into wikipedia. The average person is not typically scientifically literate and has difficulties distinguishing between claims that have substantial evidence and history backing them and more recent claims that are still being researched. Also, what's up with this article? It's quite insubstantial and has little to no content, let alone careful analysis of the situation. It's quite evident to me that it's biased garbage with an agenda of tricking poorly educated people into thinking modern higher-education is a waste of time and money (spoiler alert--it isn't, and without it we wouldn't even have many of the practical commercial developments (usually not associated w/ academia) we see today).
- abricot 6y ago> Academics are typically publishing research they think will push their fields forward some day or illuminate something as of yet misunderstood. Is that the dream or is it the reality? I think I've heard plenty of anecdotes to the contrary (or is it simply the self-derogatory way scholars talk amongst themselves)
- candiodari 6y agoWhy not both? Most research directions ... are useless, don't pan out, don't have the tools to actually achieve anything yet, won't ever get finance for necessary tooling, ... and fail. Useless is the least bad of these. Nevertheless, papers on these are important for a lot of reasons. And one in hundred research directions succeeds. And then there's tons of "refinement" papers. First reason: you won't know which is which until you try. Second: researchers learn a lot even when exploring things that won't work (in fact this is often done as exercise). Third: these allow institutions, infrastructure, ... to exist, to be ready when there is something that does pan out.
- ykevinator 6y agoThis is not true for math and engineering, where most progress is incremental (I put out about 20 peer reviewed publications before leaving academia because it was too slow and dull).
- aazaa 6y ago> 82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once. No references to source data. Hard pass.
- Finnucane 6y ago97 percent of citations are not read either.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago70% of statistics are made up.
- msapaydin 6y agoMany reward systems around the world reward the number of papers and not the number of readers of a paper. Many biographies simply include the number of papers by such and such author. This further contributes to the crappy situation.
- geofft 6y agoThis is simply an instance of Goodhart's Law, that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. Universities (and the social structures that provide money to them for them to pay faculty) want to pay professors for doing worthwhile research and advancing the state of human knowledge. They've settled on publications as a measure for that goal - and the measure has become a target. However, I'm not sure I agree with the followup claim of this article: "One unfortunate effect of this specialization is that the subject matter of most articles make them inaccessible to the public, and even to the overwhelming majority of professors. ... increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves." The evidence given that the work of professors is inaccessible to the public and also to other professors is the fact that one journal has published articles with the following three titles: "Dona Benta’s Rosary: Managing Ambiguity in a Brazilian Women’s Prayer Group", "Death and Demonization of a Bodhisattva: Guanyin’s Reformulation within Chinese Religion", and "Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women’s Disability in Rabbinic Marriage Law". The author thinks that it's obvious that nobody cares about these articles and that they're crap. Here are the articles and parts of their abstracts: - https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/84/3/776/1751661 https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/84/3/776/1751... "This article describes the rituals and beliefs of an upper-class Catholic women's prayer group in a small city in southeast Brazil. My interest centers on why there is so little friction within the group when it would seem to have several potentially significant internal and external tensions. There are stark doctrinal differences between members: some have very liberal and even syncretic beliefs while others express very conservative, exclusive Catholic beliefs. At the same time, the group—despite certain unorthodox beliefs and practices—maintains close relations with representatives of the local Catholic Church and prays jointly on occasion with an evangelical group...." - http://www.academia.edu/download/52637206/Meulenbeld_Death_and_Demonization_690-726.pdf http://www.academia.edu/download/52637206/Meulenbeld_Death_a... "The Chinese goddess known as Guanyin may commonly be referred to with the Buddhist epithet of 'bodhisattva,' yet her many hagiographies contain only the most stereotypical references to anything that could be defined unambiguously as 'Buddhist.' Instead, the narrative of Guanyin that gains greatest popularity between the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries is one that describes the bodhisattva's last incarnation, as the unmarried Princess Miaoshan, within the parameters of indigenous Chinese religion—or, rather, its demonology. I argue that all of the many versions of Miaoshan's legend represent her deification into Guanyin as a process necessary for solving her spirit's demonical status that has arisen from the recurring violence done to her body by herself and her father...." - https://www.academia.edu/download/39308303/2015_Brides_and_Blemishes-Queering_Womens_Disability_in_Rabbinic_Marriage_Law.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/39308303/2015_Brides_and_B... "... While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men's capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women's disability in primarily visual terms. ..." All seem pretty interesting to me, and all seem very personally relevant to vast swaths of the general public - Catholics and more generally Christians who worship alongside people of varying levels of orthodoxy, Chinese Buddhists, and Jewish people who care about rabbinic marriage law, respectively. All seem like pretty easily accessible topics to anyone in the general public with an interest in religion. I wonder to what extent the problem is that none of these three are interesting to the author, a former senior fellow at a Koch-affiliated think tank who received his doctorate in systematic theology at a Catholic university. Perhaps, to him, discussions about productive communities inviting syncretic variants of Catholicism are not worth being covered in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, let alone discussions of Buddhism or Judaism, let alone anything with the word "queering".
- woranl 6y agoAcademic journals are not news articles or Facebook posts begging for eye balls. If only a few of them that are important enough to help push humanity forward, then that is good enough.
- jmole 6y agoStudents spend their entire K-12+ careers writing crap that no one reads. Why are we surprised when it should continue beyond that?
- goldcd 6y agoThat did suddenly make me think. Normally we write in the hope that many will read and appreciate our output. At school many write, in the hope that just one will.
- begemotz 6y agoThis is a re-posted article (probably without permission) from this 2016 article: https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/why-professors-are-writing-crap-nobody-reads/ https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/why-professors-are-... The original article has a few hyper-links to some sources (with varying degrees of credibility).
- jvanderbot 6y agoMost magazine articles probably are never read either. Same with news articles. Academic publications are "news for specialized research" nothing more.
- thu2111 6y agoMagazines and newspapers that literally nobody is reading eventually go bankrupt. The system has ways to keep that in check. Not so in academia, which is immune to market forces.
- jvanderbot 6y ago.. because it is subsidized for public good, my friend (I argue). Also, I said the journals are the product, not the articles. And every journal issue gets readers, and the number of readers is market-inducing, but many articles in those journals do not (at least not yet).
- thu2111 6y agoIf the papers are crap and nobody reads them it's not the public good, it's just waste. As for journals, those are paid for mostly by universities, which are themselves funded by governments. Really, academia is just an entirely parallel economy to the real one, but it's a closed loop planned economy in which the ultimate end goal of making technology people like is subverted to artificial targets like quantity of papers published.
- Delk 6y agoI'd argue the ultimate goal of academia and academic research isn't making technology. That's based on a very narrow view of academia (focusing entirely on engineering and the sciences with immediate technological applicability), and on the premise that we want only technological gadgets rather than understanding as and end goal. The primary end goal of academic research should be to understand and find answers to interesting questions, not to build applications. The applications are a good secondary goal, but not the only one. You may or may not want to support that first goal, but that shouldn't distort the goal of academic research into just a technology factory. Of course that doesn't mean a lot of research isn't crap. But you also have to remember that research that is novel, broadly interesting and high quality is a lot harder to do than yet another application. I also agree that the quantity of papers published shouldn't be a target. I think almost everybody agrees on that. (FWIW, I'm not in academia.)
- hzhou321 6y agoI think the real question is how to justify funding a professor who has nothing to prove his value. Recall in history how often we rediscover certain great theory or study of one or some underpaid scholars hundreds of years later? I believe it is reasonable to agree that we need keep funding to support a population of scholars whose contribution cannot be readily and accurately assessed. On the other hand, we also cannot afford to support every one who merely claim to be a scholar. So the question is how to keep the balance. Shall we assume having professors writing articles that no one reads, is one mechanism to keep that balance? Even though the mechanism itself is far from ideal, but until something better prove itself, it is a futile argument.
- geofft 6y agoRight, the thing that rubs me the wrong way about this article is the assumption that, because nobody reads what these professors are writing, the work is crap and should not have been done. The real solution to the problem is that we should find ways to get more people to read what these professors are writing! (Which will also have the side effect of improving the quality of any portion of it that truly is crap.)
- hzhou321 6y agoI happen to think that most of the research is crap. However, I would argue that is not necessarily something need to be fixed. Discoveries of the century often need some bases even though most of the bases just serve as background support.
- thu2111 6y agoProfessors are paid to write. They get paid to write even if nobody reads what they write. Is it really such a strange assumption that in many cases nobody reads what they write becauase it's just the academic equivalent of SEO spam? Manipulating h-index scores is not unheard of. Having read quite a lot of research papers over the years from relatively 'hard' subjects, I can't honestly say it's helped me in any way. The ones in computer science tend at least to be mostly free of logic errors or misleading descriptions, but venturing into other fields is a reality check: way too many papers are terrible even in supposedly respected journals. The article points out a frequent problem of terrible papers: they cite other papers that don't actually say what the cited claim is saying. "Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read." If so few people are even reading the papers, is it any wonder nobody reads cited papers to check the citation is valid? This happens even in fairly important scientific and medical papers, so I can't imagine how bad it gets in religious or gender studies.
- jseliger 6y agoAlso useful: "The Research Bust:" http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Research-Bust/129930/ http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Research-Bust/129930/ It focuses mostly on the humanities; I think the simple answer is that tenure, promotion, publishing, and hiring have settled into a negative equilibrium, but no individual has the power to alter the equilibrium, even when an individual recognizes the problems.
- aborsy 6y agoThe vast majority of academics are there for power and status. I rarely see a true scholar, and nearly always bizarre characters and politicians to say the least. Politics in academia is especially vicious.
- Rochus 6y ago> The goal of all professors is to get tenure, and right now, tenure continues to be awarded based in part on how many peer-reviewed publications they have. This is a sad truth and the consequence of a total mistaken development. Professors are forced to be marketers, money collectors and managers. One must not forget that the peer reviewers are also professors, who try to improve or strengthen their position through this role. So both the authors and the reviewers lose time, which is then lost in research or student support.
- CawCawCaw 6y agoAlso, Sturgeon's Law.