6 ms·

I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to the point of "considerable at a

I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to the point of "considerable at all" came from me. It was a chair which normally prouded itself of only publishing in the most highly regarded journals of its field (internally graded A, B, C). They had a few years without viable paper. Desperate to publish. From my POV this was a D. The paper is worthless crap, hastily put together within two weeks. It should have been obvious to the reviewers. I feel ashamed that my name is on it. I wish I could retract it. So, yes please: make it hard to impossible for paper mills and kill the whole publish or perish approach.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cgcrob 2y ago
If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses. I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discarded when it broke their predefined conclusion.
- anoncow 2y ago
  When research is just means to an end... I think as children if we are taught what earning a living means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes to research people should know that perhaps money will not be great. It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as children, we follow our passions (or we follow cool passions) and then realise that money is also important and then resort to unethical means to get that money. Let's be transparent about hard fields with children so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I suspect there's a lot of people that end up pursuing research because they enjoy college and learning with the idea of seeking out a job sounding rather less enjoyable, and more education will just equal more $$$ in said job anyhow, right? In the past this wasn't an issue because university was seen as optional, now in most places it's ostensibly required to obtain a sufficiently well paying job, and so much more of society ends up on a treadmill that they may not really want to hop off of.
  - cgcrob 2y ago
    Yeah that's about right. I think in some fields you walk into them with some kind of noble ideology, possibly driven by marketing but then you find out it's all bullshit and you're n-years into your educational investment then. Your options are to shrug and join in or write everything off and walk away. I don't blame people for taking advantage of it but in some areas, particularly health related, there are consequences to society past financial concerns.
  - acuozzo 2y ago
    > so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into I don't think this would help. IMO, it's a money vs. effort thing. Yes, real research is hard, but if someone learns early on that the system can be easily gamed, then the required effort is relatively low. Plus, there's the friction factor. Moving from undergrad to grad to post-grad to professor keeps you within an institution you know. The game is this: get hired at a research university and pump out phony papers which look legit enough to not raise any suspicions until you get tenure. Wrap the phoniness of each paper in a shroud of plausible deniability. If anything comes out after you're tenured, then just deny and/or deflect any wrongdoing.
- archi42 2y ago
  I treat all social science degrees as "likely bullshit" these days. Could as well be astrology. A few computer science friends of mine worked at a social science department during university. Their tasks included maintaining the computers, but also support the researchers with experiment design (if computers were involved) and statistical analysis. They got into trouble because they didn't want to use unsound or incorrect methods. The general train of thought was not "does the data confirm my hypothesis?" but "how can I make my data confirm my hypothesis?" instead. Often experiments were biased to achieve the desired results. As a result, these scientific misconduct was business as usual and the guys eventually quit.
  - cess11 2y ago
    Sounds like economics. Research fraud is common pretty much everywhere in academia, especially where there's money, i.e. adjacent to industry.
    - ninalanyon 2y ago
      It does rather depend on the industry. Research in fields relevant to electrical engineering are much less likely to be fraudulent because the industry actually uses the results to make the products and the customers depend on those products working as specified.. If you discover a better and cheaper ceramic insulator you can be confident that transformer manufacturers will take it up but the big companies are well stocked with experts in the field so a fraudulent paper will quickly be spotted.
      - cess11 2y ago
        Graphene in electrical engineering is a staple of every (dis)reputable papermill.
        genewitch 2y ago
        "New battery tech promises 1.5x density, no fire risk, 20 year lifespan"
- meindnoch 2y ago
  Luckily this made-up social science trash won't be used as evidence when shaping our policies, so it's pretty harmless! /s
  - comfysocks 2y ago
    To be fair, lobbyists will use phony science from any field to influence policy, not just the social sciences. Think of the tobacco industry.
  - schnable 2y ago
    The science is settled, bro.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  I'm not a fan of flaming, but I have to get it out: where are the people screaming "THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!" in any thread involving politically-relevant science? How can they read stuff like this constantly posted on HN then just trust sociology/psychology du jour to tell them what to think (or more likely, to help them justify what was already in their head)? Is Gell-Mann amnesia that potent?
tovej 2y ago
I have a similar experience. We had a truly terrible paper written as a collaboration with a team from the US on a software project, integrating their "novel" and "innovative" component. The component took 1 hour to compile, the architecture made no sense, and the US professor constantly talked about nothing but high-flying marketing concepts. I managed to hack together a demo using their component, fixing build bugs and design flaws (the ones I could do something about). The proof of concept worked, but it wasn't doing anything new. We were just doing what we used to do, but now this terrible component was involved in it, making everything slower and more complicated. Somehow that became a paper, and somehow this paper passed review without a single comment (my feeling is it's because of the professor's name recognition). I'm ashamed to have my name on that paper.
saagarjha 2y ago
As a co-author are you not able to do so?
- black_puppydog 2y ago
  Technically being able isn't the same as your career surviving actually going through with it.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    Damned if you do and damned if you don't
- psychoslave 2y ago
  In theory $SYSTEM is the most excellent thing that humanity could ever hope and everyone knows they that by acting in accordance with the stated expected behaviors, they will act in the best way they can think of to achieve the best result for everybody. In practice people see that $SYSTEM is rotten and most likely to doom everyone on the long span, with increasingly absurd actions accepted silently on the road. But they also have the firm conviction that not bending the knee, be brave and say out loud what’s in everyone mind, will only put them on the fast track to play the scapegoat and change nothing else on the overall. Think about it: over-reporting of grain production was a major factor of the great Chinese Famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
  - wadadadad 2y ago
    Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly interesting to see how such a failure could occur through human means and the significant impact it had, and how it can directly relate to academia (really, many topics, anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM'). The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth. I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten" system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').
osrec 2y ago
I can't make sense of your first sentence. Can you rephrase it please?
- lqet 2y ago
  OP's supervisor wrote a paper without any merit. OP then provided a "petty idea" that made the paper "considerable at all". That's how he ended up as co-author.
  - GuestFAUniverse 2y ago
    Thanks, exactly as I wanted it to be understood.
autoexec 2y ago
Maybe we need an "Alan Smithee" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee) for research papers.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cgcrob 2y ago

If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses. I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discarded when it broke their predefined conclusion.

anoncow 2y ago
When research is just means to an end... I think as children if we are taught what earning a living means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes to research people should know that perhaps money will not be great. It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as children, we follow our passions (or we follow cool passions) and then realise that money is also important and then resort to unethical means to get that money. Let's be transparent about hard fields with children so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I suspect there's a lot of people that end up pursuing research because they enjoy college and learning with the idea of seeking out a job sounding rather less enjoyable, and more education will just equal more $$$ in said job anyhow, right? In the past this wasn't an issue because university was seen as optional, now in most places it's ostensibly required to obtain a sufficiently well paying job, and so much more of society ends up on a treadmill that they may not really want to hop off of.
- cgcrob 2y ago
  Yeah that's about right. I think in some fields you walk into them with some kind of noble ideology, possibly driven by marketing but then you find out it's all bullshit and you're n-years into your educational investment then. Your options are to shrug and join in or write everything off and walk away. I don't blame people for taking advantage of it but in some areas, particularly health related, there are consequences to society past financial concerns.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  > so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into I don't think this would help. IMO, it's a money vs. effort thing. Yes, real research is hard, but if someone learns early on that the system can be easily gamed, then the required effort is relatively low. Plus, there's the friction factor. Moving from undergrad to grad to post-grad to professor keeps you within an institution you know. The game is this: get hired at a research university and pump out phony papers which look legit enough to not raise any suspicions until you get tenure. Wrap the phoniness of each paper in a shroud of plausible deniability. If anything comes out after you're tenured, then just deny and/or deflect any wrongdoing.
archi42 2y ago
I treat all social science degrees as "likely bullshit" these days. Could as well be astrology. A few computer science friends of mine worked at a social science department during university. Their tasks included maintaining the computers, but also support the researchers with experiment design (if computers were involved) and statistical analysis. They got into trouble because they didn't want to use unsound or incorrect methods. The general train of thought was not "does the data confirm my hypothesis?" but "how can I make my data confirm my hypothesis?" instead. Often experiments were biased to achieve the desired results. As a result, these scientific misconduct was business as usual and the guys eventually quit.
- cess11 2y ago
  Sounds like economics. Research fraud is common pretty much everywhere in academia, especially where there's money, i.e. adjacent to industry.
  - ninalanyon 2y ago
    It does rather depend on the industry. Research in fields relevant to electrical engineering are much less likely to be fraudulent because the industry actually uses the results to make the products and the customers depend on those products working as specified.. If you discover a better and cheaper ceramic insulator you can be confident that transformer manufacturers will take it up but the big companies are well stocked with experts in the field so a fraudulent paper will quickly be spotted.
    - cess11 2y ago
      Graphene in electrical engineering is a staple of every (dis)reputable papermill.
      - genewitch 2y ago
        "New battery tech promises 1.5x density, no fire risk, 20 year lifespan"
meindnoch 2y ago
Luckily this made-up social science trash won't be used as evidence when shaping our policies, so it's pretty harmless! /s
- comfysocks 2y ago
  To be fair, lobbyists will use phony science from any field to influence policy, not just the social sciences. Think of the tobacco industry.
- schnable 2y ago
  The science is settled, bro.
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
I'm not a fan of flaming, but I have to get it out: where are the people screaming "THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!" in any thread involving politically-relevant science? How can they read stuff like this constantly posted on HN then just trust sociology/psychology du jour to tell them what to think (or more likely, to help them justify what was already in their head)? Is Gell-Mann amnesia that potent?

tovej 2y ago

I have a similar experience. We had a truly terrible paper written as a collaboration with a team from the US on a software project, integrating their "novel" and "innovative" component. The component took 1 hour to compile, the architecture made no sense, and the US professor constantly talked about nothing but high-flying marketing concepts. I managed to hack together a demo using their component, fixing build bugs and design flaws (the ones I could do something about). The proof of concept worked, but it wasn't doing anything new. We were just doing what we used to do, but now this terrible component was involved in it, making everything slower and more complicated. Somehow that became a paper, and somehow this paper passed review without a single comment (my feeling is it's because of the professor's name recognition). I'm ashamed to have my name on that paper.

saagarjha 2y ago

As a co-author are you not able to do so?

black_puppydog 2y ago
Technically being able isn't the same as your career surviving actually going through with it.
- ithkuil 2y ago
  Damned if you do and damned if you don't
psychoslave 2y ago
In theory $SYSTEM is the most excellent thing that humanity could ever hope and everyone knows they that by acting in accordance with the stated expected behaviors, they will act in the best way they can think of to achieve the best result for everybody. In practice people see that $SYSTEM is rotten and most likely to doom everyone on the long span, with increasingly absurd actions accepted silently on the road. But they also have the firm conviction that not bending the knee, be brave and say out loud what’s in everyone mind, will only put them on the fast track to play the scapegoat and change nothing else on the overall. Think about it: over-reporting of grain production was a major factor of the great Chinese Famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
- wadadadad 2y ago
  Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly interesting to see how such a failure could occur through human means and the significant impact it had, and how it can directly relate to academia (really, many topics, anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM'). The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth. I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten" system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').

osrec 2y ago

I can't make sense of your first sentence. Can you rephrase it please?

lqet 2y ago
OP's supervisor wrote a paper without any merit. OP then provided a "petty idea" that made the paper "considerable at all". That's how he ended up as co-author.
- GuestFAUniverse 2y ago
  Thanks, exactly as I wanted it to be understood.

autoexec 2y ago

Maybe we need an "Alan Smithee" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee) for research papers.