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Why normalize by population and not scholarly output? I suggest number of published academic articles, and even that isn't a proper metric, but it does paint a

Why normalize by population and not scholarly output? I suggest number of published academic articles, and even that isn't a proper metric, but it does paint a very different picture than yours. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/20-countries-publishing-the-most-scholarly-articles.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/20-countries-publishing-...

wongarsu 5y ago
> Why normalize by population and not scholarly output? I did it out of personal bias: I use scihub for hobby and work but my scholarly output so far has been 0. How you choose to normalize the table is probably a good litmus test for how you view science: if you think the goal of science is to generate insight you normalize by population, if you think it's to communicate in the scientific community you normalize by academic activity, if you think it's to advance society you normalize by GPD (or HDI or GPI).
- willis936 5y ago
  I don't think the methodology is necessarily colored by my view of science. My assumption is that most of scientific paper downloads are done by people who are employed to do it. Granted, it's a flawed assumption and there are no metrics on "how many papers are downloaded by which demographics", so we don't really have enough information to make a strong conclusion, but the right answer is probably somewhere in between.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    > the right answer is probably somewhere in between. Almost certainly. All the views I listed are valid in their own right, and their proportion probably shifts depending on discipline. Anecdotally papers around health, well-being or fitness seem to reach an audience of people looking for self-improvement, meanwhile machine learning papers seem to be read by people on or for their job a lot. Some other disciplines meanwhile don't seem to reach a notable audience apart from themselves. Which is fine in it's own right. I would actually love to see statistics on this, but I don't think anyone is in a position to provide them.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    People I know who work in universities have access to lots of papers for free. For us mere mortals who need to survive (which these papers definitely help), we need to use sci-hub, as the per article fees are huge.
    - eldaisfish 5y ago
      for what it's worth, if you know the author's names, it's easy to find their email addresses online. Most authors would gladly send you a copy of their paper for free.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        On sci-hub you can skim 20 papers in an hour to find the 3 that are relevant. That's weeks of work of emailing for preprints.
    - doliveira 5y ago
      Even then, there can be quite a lot of bureaucracy. At the beginning of my Master's degree (Brazil) I had automatic and frictionless access to papers through the University network, then they started requiring access through some weird government website. I just went to Sci-Hub, much easier.
NavinF 5y ago
How would you even interpret the data if it was normalized by scholarly output or papers published? I’m pretty sure the largest downloaders are people from industry rather than academia. I might open 50 papers in one day just to look at the graphs and then read just one. I’d guess the second largest are high school students. They might not read papers very often, but there are a whole lot more of them than academics.

wongarsu 5y ago

> Why normalize by population and not scholarly output? I did it out of personal bias: I use scihub for hobby and work but my scholarly output so far has been 0. How you choose to normalize the table is probably a good litmus test for how you view science: if you think the goal of science is to generate insight you normalize by population, if you think it's to communicate in the scientific community you normalize by academic activity, if you think it's to advance society you normalize by GPD (or HDI or GPI).

willis936 5y ago
I don't think the methodology is necessarily colored by my view of science. My assumption is that most of scientific paper downloads are done by people who are employed to do it. Granted, it's a flawed assumption and there are no metrics on "how many papers are downloaded by which demographics", so we don't really have enough information to make a strong conclusion, but the right answer is probably somewhere in between.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  > the right answer is probably somewhere in between. Almost certainly. All the views I listed are valid in their own right, and their proportion probably shifts depending on discipline. Anecdotally papers around health, well-being or fitness seem to reach an audience of people looking for self-improvement, meanwhile machine learning papers seem to be read by people on or for their job a lot. Some other disciplines meanwhile don't seem to reach a notable audience apart from themselves. Which is fine in it's own right. I would actually love to see statistics on this, but I don't think anyone is in a position to provide them.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  People I know who work in universities have access to lots of papers for free. For us mere mortals who need to survive (which these papers definitely help), we need to use sci-hub, as the per article fees are huge.
  - eldaisfish 5y ago
    for what it's worth, if you know the author's names, it's easy to find their email addresses online. Most authors would gladly send you a copy of their paper for free.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      On sci-hub you can skim 20 papers in an hour to find the 3 that are relevant. That's weeks of work of emailing for preprints.
  - doliveira 5y ago
    Even then, there can be quite a lot of bureaucracy. At the beginning of my Master's degree (Brazil) I had automatic and frictionless access to papers through the University network, then they started requiring access through some weird government website. I just went to Sci-Hub, much easier.

NavinF 5y ago

How would you even interpret the data if it was normalized by scholarly output or papers published? I’m pretty sure the largest downloaders are people from industry rather than academia. I might open 50 papers in one day just to look at the graphs and then read just one. I’d guess the second largest are high school students. They might not read papers very often, but there are a whole lot more of them than academics.