4 ms·

The real morality play here is to publish your work. I suggest that Shepard had a net-negative effect on the field. Anyone who might eventually have done the s

by tlb 3y ago

The real morality play here is to publish your work. I suggest that Shepard had a net-negative effect on the field. Anyone who might eventually have done the same research would have heard about Shepard's work and been discouraged from re-doing it. Yet, it remained obscure and little-used. It may be better to not do the research at all than to do it, mark the territory, and not publish.

macleginn 3y ago
This. I had a grant proposal rejected because the reviewers knew that something similar was being done by someone else -- who then never bothered to complete the work and publish properly.
- JohnKemeny 3y ago
  What recently happened with me is that we proved an open problem, and while writing it up, we found that the result was claimed in an arxiv paper that never got published anywhere. Their proof was incomplete. This meant that we had to acknowledge that the result already was claimed by someone else, but that we couldn't understand the proof attempt. This of course leads to problems because now our result is somehow viewed as less valuable, and more difficult to publish. Which again means that research in that area will suffer from an unpublished claim.
  - itronitron 3y ago
    What are you measuring to determine that now your result is viewed as less valuable? Is it the peer reviewers or personal conviction? In the end all that matters for you, to the extent that peer-reviewed publications are important to your career, is that your paper gets cited. And if people are citing the unfinished arxiv paper instead of yours then that speaks poorly of their own research and not yours.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
derbOac 3y ago
Talking to people who worked in that era, it was a different time with different constraints. There was no internet, and publishing a paper could be a time-intensive and laborious process. Typing, mailing, typesetting, and so forth. So it was common for a lot of stuff to just be published in house as technical reports and so forth, to not involve the overhead of external publishers. If you wanted something, you'd mail or call a colleague and ask them, and they'd mail you a white paper or monograph from their stack of copies in the hallway. I started doing research long ago enough that I got a bit of exposure to that world, in the sense that that publication process was still briefly in place, and I saw those white papers passed around and used. Some of them were very influential. The problem in some ways is that as people migrated to the current system with an emphasis on published articles, that stuff that people were actually using kind of dropped out of consciousness, sort of along the lines the article is describing. I can think of unpublished white papers that were cited immensely; people made fun of them never being turned into published papers. Maybe it's hurt the the paper in the current day along the lines of the target piece, but what's sad or funny is it never occurred to people that there was a work that was being cited a lot that never got published, as in to question the value of the publication process itself. I don't disagree with you but there's a bit of broader historical context that's missing from the piece I think. The irony is that today we might be seeing a return to the white paper model, in the form of preprints and open access archival papers, but it's just massively distributed. Maybe there's some lessons to be learned from that lost previous era (Google search dropping links, etc.)? Maybe it's just inevitable that as time goes on some things will be lost regardless.

by tlb 3y ago

macleginn 3y ago

This. I had a grant proposal rejected because the reviewers knew that something similar was being done by someone else -- who then never bothered to complete the work and publish properly.

JohnKemeny 3y ago
What recently happened with me is that we proved an open problem, and while writing it up, we found that the result was claimed in an arxiv paper that never got published anywhere. Their proof was incomplete. This meant that we had to acknowledge that the result already was claimed by someone else, but that we couldn't understand the proof attempt. This of course leads to problems because now our result is somehow viewed as less valuable, and more difficult to publish. Which again means that research in that area will suffer from an unpublished claim.
- itronitron 3y ago
  What are you measuring to determine that now your result is viewed as less valuable? Is it the peer reviewers or personal conviction? In the end all that matters for you, to the extent that peer-reviewed publications are important to your career, is that your paper gets cited. And if people are citing the unfinished arxiv paper instead of yours then that speaks poorly of their own research and not yours.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

derbOac 3y ago

Talking to people who worked in that era, it was a different time with different constraints. There was no internet, and publishing a paper could be a time-intensive and laborious process. Typing, mailing, typesetting, and so forth. So it was common for a lot of stuff to just be published in house as technical reports and so forth, to not involve the overhead of external publishers. If you wanted something, you'd mail or call a colleague and ask them, and they'd mail you a white paper or monograph from their stack of copies in the hallway. I started doing research long ago enough that I got a bit of exposure to that world, in the sense that that publication process was still briefly in place, and I saw those white papers passed around and used. Some of them were very influential. The problem in some ways is that as people migrated to the current system with an emphasis on published articles, that stuff that people were actually using kind of dropped out of consciousness, sort of along the lines the article is describing. I can think of unpublished white papers that were cited immensely; people made fun of them never being turned into published papers. Maybe it's hurt the the paper in the current day along the lines of the target piece, but what's sad or funny is it never occurred to people that there was a work that was being cited a lot that never got published, as in to question the value of the publication process itself. I don't disagree with you but there's a bit of broader historical context that's missing from the piece I think. The irony is that today we might be seeing a return to the white paper model, in the form of preprints and open access archival papers, but it's just massively distributed. Maybe there's some lessons to be learned from that lost previous era (Google search dropping links, etc.)? Maybe it's just inevitable that as time goes on some things will be lost regardless.