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Why are these questionable papers? Academics are forced to publish as many papers as possible. The system pushes their own to go for the smallest publishable un

Why are these questionable papers? Academics are forced to publish as many papers as possible. The system pushes their own to go for the smallest publishable unit, people will find a way to optimise for that, and who are we to blame them for that? They're underpaid, overworked researchers trying to guess what the opaque and brutal funding system wants from them. Is there outright fraud, or are they just dull/pointless papers? if first, yeah that's questionable, but a lot of these example papers look more like they're dull, rather than committing fraud. We should rather tear down the awful system instead of playing whack-a-mole with academia's newest outcropping.

jeltz 4y ago
There is outright fraud but I think most are just dull and pointless.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> We should rather tear down the awful system instead of playing whack-a-mole with academia's newest outcropping. There isn’t one “system” that can be torn down and replaced. A lot of these papers are coming from groups and institutions in foreign countries that are basically trying to role-play as researchers so they can blend in with actual researchers and try to reap the reputation and career rewards. It’s not really centralized. This is akin to suggesting that we need to tear down the entire “e-mail system” because spammers are abusing it to send spam appearing as legitimate email. Why is it a problem? Because these contribute nothing but noise and confusion to the field and make it more difficult for actual researchers to sort through real research. There is no reason to forgive these faux-researchers for trying to extract money and prestige from a system without making actual contributions. The idea to “tear down the system” doesn’t even make sense unless you propose something different. Are you suggesting we stop rewarding anyone in any way for research? That would remove the incentives, but now we have a problem that research isn’t rewarded at all and real researchers won’t do it because they need to eat.
hammock 4y ago
Is there also danger that any flagging system could be abused, with the end of censorship of problematic viewpoints, rather than merely bad science?
asdff 4y ago
Not every paper is to be some grand work. Sometimes you get a result and literally want to move on with your life. Maybe you want to focus more on another project. Maybe you want to finally defend your thesis or be done with this post doc tenure and uproot yourself. Maybe the grant only funded a year of work. Feature creep is a real thing with research papers. A paper shouldn't take years to publish, if it does you should publish the earlier findings and just cite that in your later paper so those ideas can get out there as soon as possible, instead of sitting in your draft for potentially years.

jeltz 4y ago

There is outright fraud but I think most are just dull and pointless.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> We should rather tear down the awful system instead of playing whack-a-mole with academia's newest outcropping. There isn’t one “system” that can be torn down and replaced. A lot of these papers are coming from groups and institutions in foreign countries that are basically trying to role-play as researchers so they can blend in with actual researchers and try to reap the reputation and career rewards. It’s not really centralized. This is akin to suggesting that we need to tear down the entire “e-mail system” because spammers are abusing it to send spam appearing as legitimate email. Why is it a problem? Because these contribute nothing but noise and confusion to the field and make it more difficult for actual researchers to sort through real research. There is no reason to forgive these faux-researchers for trying to extract money and prestige from a system without making actual contributions. The idea to “tear down the system” doesn’t even make sense unless you propose something different. Are you suggesting we stop rewarding anyone in any way for research? That would remove the incentives, but now we have a problem that research isn’t rewarded at all and real researchers won’t do it because they need to eat.

hammock 4y ago

Is there also danger that any flagging system could be abused, with the end of censorship of problematic viewpoints, rather than merely bad science?

asdff 4y ago

Not every paper is to be some grand work. Sometimes you get a result and literally want to move on with your life. Maybe you want to focus more on another project. Maybe you want to finally defend your thesis or be done with this post doc tenure and uproot yourself. Maybe the grant only funded a year of work. Feature creep is a real thing with research papers. A paper shouldn't take years to publish, if it does you should publish the earlier findings and just cite that in your later paper so those ideas can get out there as soon as possible, instead of sitting in your draft for potentially years.