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I think this is great. Nature is really a way for scientists to score points, not a publication that you read cover to cover that needs stylistic consistency. R
by lacker 6y ago
I think this is great. Nature is really a way for scientists to score points, not a publication that you read cover to cover that needs stylistic consistency. Right now the academic citation-count scoring mechanism doesn’t give enough incentive for people to work on the important infrastructure pieces like Numpy. So this is a good step towards putting scientific priorities in the right place.
- Aperocky 6y agoYep, especially when the author are the people who wrote numpy, I have absolutely no problem with that. It's about time they be recognized for their contribution to the tools of science.
- teorema 6y agoI definitely think things like the infrastructure don't get enough credit. I also mean no criticism of numpy. But is Numpy per se conceptually that innovative, from a computer science perspective? I guess to me this just seemed unusually introductory, about a specific library for a specific language. Put another way: if I was going to cite numpy, would I cite this? Probably not. Would I cite this paper for any of the more general concepts it covers? Probably not. I'd probably even argue someone shouldn't cite it for that latter reason, as those concepts supercede numpy (and appear in other languages under other names).
- konjin 6y agoI forget who, probably Hamming, said his most cited paper ever was just an intro to statistics for biologists. This is not a new thing and it's not a bad thing. Papers are meant to spread information. If a field isn't aware that another field has solved a problem of theirs than even a 101 level paper is worth writing.