4 ms·
The root of the problem is referred to implicitly: publish or perish. To get tenure, you need publications, preferably highly cited, and money, which comes from
by tgv 9mo ago
The root of the problem is referred to implicitly: publish or perish. To get tenure, you need publications, preferably highly cited, and money, which comes from grants that your peers (mostly from other institutions) decide on. So the mutual back scratching begins, and the publication mill keeps churning out papers whose main value is the career of the author and --through citation-- influential peers, truth be damned.
- zero_shift 9mo agosomething something Goodhart's Law
- te7447 9mo agoSomething "systems that are attacked by entities that adapt often need to be defended by entities that adapt".
- bicepjai 9mo agoThe same dynamics from school carry over into adulthood: early on it’s about grades and whether you get into a “good” school; later it becomes the adult version of that treadmill : publish or perish.
- strangattractor 9mo agoCitations being the only metric is one problem. Maybe an improved rating/ranking system would be helpful. Ranking 1 to 3 - 1 being the best - 3 the bare minimum for publication. 3. Citations only 2. Citations + full disclosure of data. 1. Citations + full disclosure of data + replicated
- nick486 9mo agothis will arguably be worse. you'll just get replication rings in addition to citation rings. People who cheat in their papers will have no issues cheating in their replication studies too. All this does, is give them a new tool to attack papers they don't like by faking a failed replication.
- strangattractor 9mo ago¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- carefree-bob 8mo agoThe root of the problem is technocracy -- deferring to "science" when big money is at stake, because those scientists will be corrupted. Only trust the integrity of scientists in fields where the financial stakes are very small. Everywhere else, assume money has corrupted key actors when evaluating the trustworthiness of their results. There is no special formalism or ritual that can stop this -- not citations, not replications, not peer review. All are trivial to game when the money at stake is big enough, but we can do is try to improve transparency and treat everything with skepticism. One thing I would very much like to see is personal financial disclosures about grant awards, salaries, and funding sources of the main authors of a paper. The main author received a $400,000 grant from the Save Our Turtles foundation and a $2 million dollar grant from the John "Turtle Lover" Heisenberg foundation when writing his peer-reviewed paper revealing that more public funding for turtle sanctuaries unlocks massive local economic benefits in the Upper Mississippi Delta.