4 ms·

I’m confused about your second point: isn’t the reader the one who gains the most from reading the best papers, independently of who’s the author?

• 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
  I think the parent commenter is saying in (2) that sometimes readers want to follow a particular author, like some cartoonists prefer to read XKCD rather than Dilbert, even though they generally study all cartoons of their genre. I’ve often seen celebrity authors write a “Letter to the Journal”, for those kind of readers, and I think that that might be the safer way for big names to be recognized. It may give the author space to collaborate with interested parties without necessarily overwhelming the peer-reviewed content. At the same time, some authors are truly just prolific.
• keithwinstein 4y ago
  For the most part, sure, but at the margin I'm not sure the "best paper" can be completely well-defined within its four corners, independent of the author. E.g. the reader might rationally care (to some degree) about what a paper says about the future of the field. If an underfunded non-famous researcher describes marginal preliminary results by pursing some approach, that's one thing, but if my very successful colleagues at Berkeley/Washington/Tsinghua or Google/MSR/Alibaba publish a paper that's like, "We have gotten pretty excited about this technique for a bunch of reasons, some quantified but some more conjectural, or qualitative, or just more difficult to measure so not done yet, but here are some interesting preliminary measurements that should whet your appetite, and because of who we are, our track record of success, and our many grad students/researchers digging for gold, we'll probably find more to report in due time" well, am I wrong to be a little more interested in the second paper on the grounds that I'd like to keep up with the field? (You might also reasonably believe that the job of an editor or program committee is to assemble the most edifying program or issue when considered as an ensemble, rather than each paper individually.) I also don't think it's completely crazy to consider to a tiny degree what the reader "wants," separate from their true interest in an omniscient sense. When you click around on the Internet, do you only read the "best papers"? Probably not. This is similar to why the New York Times (and Hacker News) don't use 90% of their word count to remind readers to eat healthy, stop smoking, maintain friendships and regular activity, sleep regular hours, and give away most of their money to buy malaria nets.
• thomasahle 4y ago
  It's more like how some people would prefer to watch the next episode of the show they are already watching, even if some episode of another show is objectively better. Or some would rather read a mediocre Tweet from somebody they follow than a good tweet from somebody they don't know. That's why OP calls it "eating your vegetables", forcing people to read the "best" articles rather than the articles they "want" to read.
• ahartmetz 4y ago
  I think grandparent is suffering from the current academic environment where the main(!) purpose of a paper is getting career points.
• concinds 4y ago
  Established experts have a certain "weight"; if they decide to endorse a fringe or cutting-edge scientific view, that would be in many people's interest to know. But if that same paper in support of a fringe theory is reviewed under an anonymous name, it might not get published, even if it's perfectly well-argued, simply because "the topic is fringe and not very relevant to our readers" (circular reasoning). And even if it's not fringe, how we view an author may influence whether their paper passes peer review for perfectly legitimate reasons. If a random scientist is the 100th one to weigh in on any old debate (let's say Penrose-Lucas), it may get dismissed as non-notable. But Penrose giving his updated thoughts would be notable. There's costs to anonymous peer reviews. Credibility and notability can't be fully detached from the author.