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The playing field where one can share research findings is far more uneven, more tilted in favor of the prestigious labs and individuals more than the current f
by geraltofrivia 5y ago
The playing field where one can share research findings is far more uneven, more tilted in favor of the prestigious labs and individuals more than the current field of conferences and the blind review process.
Findings and papers from well known individuals (read: twitter accounts) do get far more attention , more citations. Of course, one can argue that, broadly, well known labs and individuals are wel known because of their tendency to do great work, write better papers. And that’s true. However, the above still holds, in my experience as PhD student in ML. Anecdotally, I have seen instances where a less interesting paper from a renowned lab got more attention and eventually more citations than a better paper accepted at the same venue by a less renowned lab on the same topic.
- cycomanic 5y agoI completely agree with you and this is a significant issue, because it makes it hard for someone not from one of the established places to get research attention. I would also argue that with the increased importance of the (mostly) commercial "high-impact" journals this has become worse. I know that some of the professional (non-expert) editors of these journals specifically look at the citation counts of authors before accepting to send them out to review, because their main aim is to get people reading the articles, not necessarily good science.
- geraltofrivia 5y agoThis is objectively worse. Commercial journals need to be bygone. I feel that the publishing venues in the field of machine learning are a great example of non commercial, (relatively) transparent, open access publications. Look at ICLR, ICML, ACL, NeurIPS, for instance. All of their proceedings are open access. Most papers their are available on arXiv as well (which has its pros and cons both that I'd rather not get into here). Many of them also have an open review process wherein the reviewers post their reviews for all to see in a forum like interface, allowing frequent back and forth with the authors. In the best case, its more akin to assist the authors refine their potentially sound findings, a dynamic process where the paper may get revised a couple times before acceptance. I believe journals need to adapt the openreview process. There are obvious parallels in the lifecycle of a journal submission (from submission to acceptance) and the openreview process, except that the latter is accelerated (for better or for worse).
- cycomanic 5y agoYes, the cloud that the large commercial journals have over the academic process is really worrying. A publication in Nature can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure or getting a grant or no grant. I have to say that I find the review process of the copernicus journals very interesting. You can see a description here: [1]. Unfortunately I don't work in a related field otherwise I would have published there already. [1] https://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/peer_review/interactive_review_process.html https://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/peer_revie...
- BlueTemplar 5y agoYeah, I was wondering : has someone tried to compare citations of papers by researchers that do not tweet / blog to those who do ?
- geraltofrivia 5y agoYep. > We find considerable evidence that, overall, article citations are positively correlated with tweets about the article, and we find little evidence to suggest that author gender affects the transmission of research in this new media https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0229446 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... (I've only skimmed the paper, a few months ago).