2 ms·

These days science is done as a "collaborative" effort, there are tons of people gaming that, like putting their names on papers where they didn't do that much,

• dguest 3y ago
  In my collaboration you get to be an author on every paper (around 100 a year) just by doing any work in the experiment. I'm an author on around 1000 papers that I haven't even downloaded, much less read.
  • jampekka 3y ago
    Are you in HEP? I think that's actually a good thing. Makes publication metrics unusable (which is a good thing) and sidesteps many gaming strategies.
    • dguest 3y ago
      It's a thing for sure. It would be great in a post-scarcity society where everyone can be funded regardless of what they do, but people are still competitive. For example: - There are still internal databases (which funding agencies can access), people fight over who gets on which paper there. There are people trying to game that system as much as they would try to game a public metric. - There's a whole cottage industry of people in these collaborations who simulate the experiment, show that it could do something, and then publish a paper (with a shorter author list) about it. This is so popular that many of these people never get around to doing the real experiment. Unfortunately I don't think we've broken free of Goodhart's Law so easily.