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Right, 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
by geofft 6y ago
Right, 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.