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> Not only this, but people publish their papers months ahead on arxiv. What's the difference between posting stuff on arxiv or uploading a pdf to your blog?

> Not only this, but people publish their papers months ahead on arxiv. What's the difference between posting stuff on arxiv or uploading a pdf to your blog? > Big labs have big publicity and thousands will read their papers. Peer review is supposed to circumvent the problem of a marketing budget being a factor in whether your paper is deemed relevant or not.

godelski 4y ago
> What's the difference between posting stuff on arxiv or uploading a pdf to your blog? There isn't. My point is that the papers aren't blind because they've been read before. Publishing onto your blog would have the same result. I'll note that this isn't common practice in other research communities. > Peer review is supposed to circumvent the problem of a marketing budget being a factor in whether your paper is deemed relevant or not. I don't see how this could even happen. Let's even say you are a no name lab and get accepted, you're in a list of hundreds or even a thousand other papers. There's publicity, yes, but it isn't massive. Let me put it this way. If you are a grad student at MIT or Stanford you will get hundreds of twitter followers relatively quickly. These followers are going to see you posting links to your papers. You have a larger network effect just by being at a larger and more prestigious school. That is the main advantage of prestigious schools and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that. But we do have to admit that there are factors that are highly important here beyond merit based. Being at MIT or Stanford does not mean your paper has more merit than a no name school or lab. That no name lab will not have the same reach, which results in fewer citations (our main metric of relevancy), and fewer researchers will be able to expand upon the work. The major problem here is that we're pretending that this doesn't happen. I don't know how to solve this issue or even know if it can be solved. But it is really dumb to go around saying everything is merit based and not acknowledge the other factors at play here. It is pretending that there's a stronger signal in the noise than there is.

godelski 4y ago

> What's the difference between posting stuff on arxiv or uploading a pdf to your blog? There isn't. My point is that the papers aren't blind because they've been read before. Publishing onto your blog would have the same result. I'll note that this isn't common practice in other research communities. > Peer review is supposed to circumvent the problem of a marketing budget being a factor in whether your paper is deemed relevant or not. I don't see how this could even happen. Let's even say you are a no name lab and get accepted, you're in a list of hundreds or even a thousand other papers. There's publicity, yes, but it isn't massive. Let me put it this way. If you are a grad student at MIT or Stanford you will get hundreds of twitter followers relatively quickly. These followers are going to see you posting links to your papers. You have a larger network effect just by being at a larger and more prestigious school. That is the main advantage of prestigious schools and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that. But we do have to admit that there are factors that are highly important here beyond merit based. Being at MIT or Stanford does not mean your paper has more merit than a no name school or lab. That no name lab will not have the same reach, which results in fewer citations (our main metric of relevancy), and fewer researchers will be able to expand upon the work. The major problem here is that we're pretending that this doesn't happen. I don't know how to solve this issue or even know if it can be solved. But it is really dumb to go around saying everything is merit based and not acknowledge the other factors at play here. It is pretending that there's a stronger signal in the noise than there is.