4 ms·
that's another thing, some people become so famous that having a paper with them is a big mark of prestige (erdos number), and people start to try to add them t
by make3 4y ago
that's another thing, some people become so famous that having a paper with them is a big mark of prestige (erdos number), and people start to try to add them to papers they only marginally looked in the general direction of at best
- bell-cot 4y agoQuite true. Though for Erdős, the huge number of coauthors was far more a side-effect of his, um, "extreme itinerant" professional lifestyle.
- throw_pm23 4y agoAlso quite many of his papers are 1-2 pages long, without much of "motivation" or "context", in the form: - Here is a problem that was posed by ... . Here is our solution to it. Here are some follow-up questions. (Which is actually refreshing and nice, just different from a current typical paper.)
- bell-cot 4y agoOh, yes. The long and pompous drivel that scientific papers seem to be padded with these days makes me wonder if they're all busy gaming "paper length" metrics, playing to an imagined audience of clueless could-be-donor billionaires, or what.
- PaulHoule 4y agoMy A.I. looks at all the cs abstracts posted to arXiv every day, I skim maybe 50 of the abstracts and download maybe 15 PDFs. I am a little shocked at how many papers are fewer than four double-spaced pages, scarcely more than a tweet if you're trying to explain something that is fundamentally new to people who aren't intimately involved in that exact corner of that exact subfield. (If my metric for "quality" was "it might frontpage if posted to HN", the superficial characteristics of the paper would be "about 25 pages with a splashy image on the first page" but unfortunately you can't tell that from the abstract, but maybe you can get the number of pages and the content first page without downloading the whole PDF.)