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You're like that Chinese sports boss who was arrested for corruption and complained that it would be impossible to do his job without participating in bribery.

You're like that Chinese sports boss who was arrested for corruption and complained that it would be impossible to do his job without participating in bribery. Just because you stand to personally gain from your corrupt practices doesn't excuse them. If anything, it makes them morally worse!

localhost8000 5y ago
I don’t really buy the comparison entirely. Presumably the sports boss is doing something patently illegal, and obviously there are alternative career paths. OP is working in academia, which is socially acceptable, and feels that this is what is normal in their academic field, necessary for their goals, and isn’t actively harmful. I wouldn’t necessarily condone the behavior, but what would you do in the situation? To always whistleblow whenever something doesn’t feel right and risk the politics? To quit working in the field if your concerns aren’t heard? To never cite papers that have absolutely any errors? I think it’s a tough situation and not productive to say OP isn’t behaving morally.
lasfter 5y ago
I don't tell lies about bad papers, only give some peremptory praise so that reviewers don't have ammunition to kill my submission. E.g. if a paper makes a false contribution X and a true contribution Y, I only mention Y. If I were to say "So-and-so claimed X but actually that's false" I would have to prove it, and unless it's a big enough issue to warrant its own paper, I don't want to prove it. Any ways, without having the raw data, source code etc for the experiments, there is no way for me to prove that X is false (I'm not a mathematician). Then the reviews will ask why I believe X is not true when peer-review accepted it. Suddenly all of my contributions are out the window, and all anybody cares about is X. The situation is even worse when the paper claiming X underwent artifact review, where reviewers actually DID look at the raw data and source code but simply lacked the attention or expertise to recognize errors. I'm not taking bribes, I'm paying a toll.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  I think you're artificially increasing the citation count for those papers which unfairly relatively disadvantages all their competitors.

localhost8000 5y ago

I don’t really buy the comparison entirely. Presumably the sports boss is doing something patently illegal, and obviously there are alternative career paths. OP is working in academia, which is socially acceptable, and feels that this is what is normal in their academic field, necessary for their goals, and isn’t actively harmful. I wouldn’t necessarily condone the behavior, but what would you do in the situation? To always whistleblow whenever something doesn’t feel right and risk the politics? To quit working in the field if your concerns aren’t heard? To never cite papers that have absolutely any errors? I think it’s a tough situation and not productive to say OP isn’t behaving morally.

lasfter 5y ago

I don't tell lies about bad papers, only give some peremptory praise so that reviewers don't have ammunition to kill my submission. E.g. if a paper makes a false contribution X and a true contribution Y, I only mention Y. If I were to say "So-and-so claimed X but actually that's false" I would have to prove it, and unless it's a big enough issue to warrant its own paper, I don't want to prove it. Any ways, without having the raw data, source code etc for the experiments, there is no way for me to prove that X is false (I'm not a mathematician). Then the reviews will ask why I believe X is not true when peer-review accepted it. Suddenly all of my contributions are out the window, and all anybody cares about is X. The situation is even worse when the paper claiming X underwent artifact review, where reviewers actually DID look at the raw data and source code but simply lacked the attention or expertise to recognize errors. I'm not taking bribes, I'm paying a toll.

exporectomy 5y ago
I think you're artificially increasing the citation count for those papers which unfairly relatively disadvantages all their competitors.