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Number of papers published as a metric? Really? I dare say that most of the papers being published would better serve to advance scientific knowledge if they w
by namelessoracle 5y ago
Number of papers published as a metric? Really?
I dare say that most of the papers being published would better serve to advance scientific knowledge if they were used as kindling to provide heat to primary school students.
- gnulinux 5y ago> I dare say that most of the papers being published would better serve to advance scientific knowledge if they were used as kindling to provide heat to primary school students. Reading blatantly anti-intellectual statements like these are very appalling in HN, and I dare say this attitude has been exponentially increasing in the last couple years. I was essentially unheard-of back when I first signed up here. Will you be able to explain us why you're of this opinion, so it has at least more substance?
- KoftaBob 5y agoI don't know if their argument of "quality over quantity" can be interpreted as anti-intellectual necessarily. If anything, I think that can be seen as pro-intellectual and against stats/funding-chasing.
- pyoeos 5y agoIt's anti-intellectual to blindly assume that the majority of papers published right now are high quality.
- R0b0t1 5y agoSame with assuming that prestigious schools are more likely to produce amazing research. I have found the absolute worst papers from otherwise respectable ivies. A case of someone buying their PhD, I assume.
- robbedpeter 5y agoThis. Journals aren't science. They aren't even good for science. They create the wrong incentives for scientific publishing and are a primary driver of the replication crisis. Open forums with science publishing for the sake of science should be the direction of travel, but we see a trajectory towards gatekeeping infected by corporate profiteering.
- droopyEyelids 5y agoThe best documented reason would be the ongoing replication crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis Aside from that, focusing on quantity of papers published has incentivized publication of papers that don't significantly increase the store of useful knowledge to humanity, and function as a bit of a haystack to obscure actual useful results Additionally the 'publish more papers' culture creates other moral hazards, like: 1. Cabals of reviewers who work to help publish each other without regard to the validity of the papers published. 2. Making authors who work for a long time on tougher science have a worse scholastic reputation than those who work to publish a large volume of insignificant papers. 3. Incentivizing p-hacking and alteration of paper scope to salvage insignificant/negative findings.
- _Wintermute 5y agoAs a practicing scientist I can't say I disagree with the original statement. Most publications are the bare minimum to get past peer-review to add another line on the author's CV. This is incentivized by academia and the whole "publish-or-perish" attitude so early-stage researchers are expected to pump out a certain number of publications otherwise they'll be out of a career in 3 years.
- namelessoracle 5y agoPublish or perish encourages empty nonsense papers that dont add much value but do add noise.
- jimbokun 5y agoPerhaps, but isn't the ratio of crap to insight be relatively constant across nations? So the more total papers output, the more total insight.
- namelessoracle 5y agoDoes the company that produces crap software eventually produce good software by sheer volume over the company that takes its time and tries to release quality software?
- jimbokun 5y agoSometimes.