5 ms·

This seems reasonable? Suppose the full result is worth 7 impact points, which is broken up into 5 points for the partial result and 2 points for the fix. The

• remus 2y ago
  > This seems reasonable? In some sense, but it does feel like the journal is missing the bigger picture somewhat. Say the two papers are A and B, and we have A + B = C. The journal is saying they'll publish C, but not A and B!
  • cubefox 2y ago
    ... A and B separately.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Nevermark 2y ago
    How many step papers before a keystone paper seems reasonable to you? I suspect readers don’t find it as exciting to read partial result papers. Unless there is an open invitation to compete on its completion, which would have a purpose and be fun. If papers are not page turners, then the journal is going to have a hard time keeping subscribers. On the other hand, publishing a proof of a Millennium Problem as several installments, is probably a fantastic idea. Time to absorb each contributing result. And the suspense! Then republish the collected papers as a signed special leather limited series edition. Easton, get on this!
    • slow_typist 2y ago
      Publishing partial results is always an invitation to compete in the completion, unless the completion is dependent on special lab capabilities which need time and money to acquire. There is no need to literally invite anyone.
      • Nevermark 2y ago
        I meant if the editors found the paper’s problem and progress especially worthy of a competition.
    • remus 2y ago
      > I suspect readers don’t find it as exciting to read partial result papers. Unless there is an open invitation to compete on its completion, which would have a purpose and be fun. If papers are not page turners, then the journal is going to have a hard time keeping subscribers. Yeah I agree, a partial result is never going to be as exciting as a full solution to a major problem. Thinking on it a little more, it seems more of a shame the journal wasn't willing to publish the first part as that sounds like it was the bulk of the work towards the end result. I quite like that he went to publish a less-than-perfect result, rather than sitting on it in the hopes of making the final improvement. That seems in the spirit of collaboration and advancing science, whereas the journal rejecting the paper because it's 98% of the problem rather than the full thing seems a shame. Having said that I guess as a journal editor you have to make these calls all the time, and Im sure every author pitches their work in the best light ("There's a breakthrough just around the corner...") and Im sure there are plenty of ideas that turn out to be dead ends.
• Ar-Curunir 2y ago
  I don’t think that’s a useful way to think about this, especially when theres so little information provided about this. Reviewing is a capricious process.
• tux3 2y ago
  If people thought this way - internalizing this publishing point idea - it would incentivize sitting on your incremental results, fiercely keeping them secret if and until you can prove the whole bigger result by yourself. However long that might take. If a series of incremental results were as prestigious as holding off to bundle them people would have reason to collaborate and complete each other's work more eagerly. Delaying an almost complete result for a year so that a journal will think it has enough impact point seems straightforwardly net bad, it slows down both progress & collaboration.
  • bradleyjg 2y ago
    The big question here is if journal space is a limited resource. Obviously it was at one point. Supposing it is, you have to trade off publishing these incremental results against publishing someone else’s complete result. What if it had taken ten papers to get there instead of two? For a sufficiently important problem, sure, but the interesting question is at a problem that’s interesting enough to publish complete but barely.
    • parpfish 2y ago
      The limiting factor isn’t journal space, but attention among the audience. (In theory) the journals publishing restrictions help to filter and condense information so the audience is maximally informed given that they will only read a fixed amount
    • btilly 2y ago
      Journal space is not a limited resource. Premium journal space is. That's because every researcher has a hierarchy of journals that they monitor. Prestigious journals are read by many researchers. So you're essentially competing for access to the limited attention of many researchers. Conversely, publishing in a premium journal has more value than a regular journal. And the big scientific publishers are therefore in competition to make sure that they own the premium journals. Which they have multiple tricks to ensure. Interestingly, their tricks only really work in science. That's because in the humanities, it is harder to establish objective opinions about quality. By contrast everyone can agree in science that Nature generally has the best papers. So attempting to raise the price on a prestigious science journal, works. Attempting to raise the price on a prestigious humanities journal, results in its circulation going down. Which makes it less prestigious.
• pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  I agree this is reasonable from the individual publisher standpoint. I once received feedback from a reviewer that I was "searching for the minimum publishable unit", and in some sense the reviewer was right -- as soon as I thought the result could be published I started working towards the publication. A publisher can reasonably resist these kinds of papers, as you're pointing out. I think the impact to scholarship in general is less clear. Do you immediately publish once you get a "big enough" result, so that others can build off of it? Or does this needlessly clutter the field with publications? There's probably some optimal balance, but I don't think the right balance is immediately clear.
  • nextn 2y ago
    Why would publishing anything new needlessly clutter the field? Discovering something is hard, proving it correct is hard, and writing a paper about is hard. Why delay all this?
    • bumby 2y ago
      Playing devils advocate, there isn’t a consensus on what is incremental vs what is derivative. In theory, the latter may not warrant publication because anyone familiar with the state-of-the-art could connect the dots without reading about it in a publication.
  • SilasX 2y ago
    Ouch. That would hurt to hear. It's like they're effectively saying, "yeah, obviously you came up with something more significant than this, which you're holding back. No one would be so incapable that this was as far as they could take the result!"
    • pinkmuffinere 2y ago
      Thankfully the reviewer feedback was of such low quality in general that it had little impact on my feelings, haha. I think that’s unfortunately common. My advisor told me “leave some obvious but unimportant mistakes, so they have something to criticize, they can feel good, and move on”. I honestly think that was good advice.
• cvoss 2y ago
  The idea that a small number of reviewers can accurately quantify the importance of a paper as some number of "impact points," and the idea that a journal should rely on this number and an arbitrary cut off point to decide publication, are both unreasonable ideas. The journal may have acted systematically, but the system is arbitrary and capricious. Thus, the journal did not act reasonably.
• Arainach 2y ago
  These patterns are ultimately detrimental to team/community building, however. You see it in software as well: As a manager in calibration meetings, I have repeatedly seen how it is harder to convince a committee to promote/give a high rating to someone with a large pile of crucial but individually small projects delivered than someone with a single large project. This is discouraging to people whose efforts seem to be unrewarded and creates bad incentives for people to hoard work and avoid sharing until one large impact, and it's disastrous when (as in most software teams) those people don't have significant autonomy over which projects they're assigned.
  • mlepath 2y ago
    Hello, fellow Metamate ;)
• saghm 2y ago
  If this was actually how stuff was measured, it might be defensible. I'm having trouble believing that things are actually done this objectively rather than the rejections being somewhat arbitrary. Do you think that results can really be analyzed and compared in this way? How do you know that it's 5 and 2 and not 6 and 1 or 4 and 3, and how do you determine how many points a full result is worth in total?
• Brian_K_White 2y ago
  It's demonstrably (there is one demonstration right there) self-defeating and counter-productive, and so by definition not reasonable. Each individual step along the way merely has some rationale, but rationales come in the full spectrum of quality.
• omoikane 2y ago
  But proportionally, wouldn't a solution without an epsilon loss be much better than a solution with epsilon? I am not sure what's the exact conjecture that the author solved, but if the epsilon difference is between an approximate solution versus an exact solution, and the journal rejected the exact solution because it was "only an epsilon improvement", I might question how reputable that journal really was.
• sunshowers 2y ago
  Given the current incentive scheme in place it's locally reasonable, but the current incentives suck. Is the goal to score the most impact points or to advance our understanding of the field?
  • mnky9800n 2y ago
    In my experience, it depends on the scientist. But it’s hard to know what an advance is. Like, people long searched for evidence of æther before giving up and accepting that light doesn’t need a medium to travel in. Perhaps 100 years from now people will laugh at the attention is all you need paper that led to the llm craze. Who knows. That’s why it’s important to give space to science. From my understanding Lorenz worked for 5 years without publishing as a research scientist before writing his atmospheric circulation paper. That paper essentially created the field of chaos. Would he be able to do the same today? Maybe? Or maybe counting papers or impact factors or all these other metrics turned science into a game instead of an intellectual pursuit. Shame we cannot ask Lorenz or Maxwell about their times as a scientist. They are dead.