5 ms·

The big deal is that journal publications are a by-product of some kinds of research, and not in themselves proof of good work. Unfortunately, it's the dominant

by _dps 14y ago

The big deal is that journal publications are a by-product of some kinds of research, and not in themselves proof of good work. Unfortunately, it's the dominant mechanistic (I won't use the word "objective") way of evaluating academic job performance. Being mechanistic, it is easily gamed, and the gaming can corrupt the underlying process (e.g. the generation of "publons" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit). Most academics see themselves as being tasked with expanding the frontier of human knowledge, not with documenting it and persuading other people that it's important (which is seen by many as a vulgar popularity and marketing contest, not an intellectual one).

Evbn 14y ago
Expanding knowledge without communicating it is useless, and salaried researchers should know that.
- cma 14y ago
  But parts of it can be a zero sum game, just like occurs between the marketing departments of Coke and Pepsi.
- _dps 14y ago
  This is pretty deep in the thread, but I'll bite because I have a few counterintuitive ideas I'd like to share. Apologies for the lengthy prose. > Expanding knowledge without communicating it is useless Perhaps controversially, I'm not sure I agree with this, at least not on the timescale of a singe person's career. Recording new knowledge is absolutely essential, and many important ideas in science were discovered or rediscovered by reading old personal notes of great scientists that never made it into a letter or article. Not even the most ardent publish-or-perish critics argue that researchers shouldn't record their ideas and findings somehow, and make those recordings available. But actually communicating the work in the present, rather than merely making it available in a recorded form, requires a willing recipient and a crafted message. So the focus on publication conflates the creation of good ideas with the ability to persuade others (and the readiness of others to be persuaded). You might say "Sure, that's also true everywhere else". Having been on both sides of the fence, my experience is that it's actually much less true everywhere else, precisely because research is so future-oriented. In most lines of work you are trying to get results today/tomorrow/this-quarter, and, while you always need to persuade in order to advance, you don't have to persuade about hypotheticals beyond your lifetime like "This theorem could become the basis for an entire field of mathematics someday". See, for example, the originally unpublished works of Karush (now at the heart of optimization theory) or Lyapunov (now the basis of much research on nonlinear systems). Both pursued their ideas for love of the ideas, and both were met with indifferent audiences. Changing the subject slightly, I submit that in many cases journal publications have evolved to be more advertising and less communication, particularly in the most prestigious journals which, for Moore-defying reasons, impose page limits and will not allow you to attach large images, data files, or programs. While not nearly as bad as patent descriptions, journal publications are almost never as useful in reproducing results as simply having the work artifacts of the research process: procedure pages from someone's lab notebook, program source code, raw data files unaltered by "smoothing for visualization", sensor/instrument configurations, the 20 line informal proof that inspired the 20 page formal proof that gets to a journal, etc. These kinds of artifacts are recorded by any researcher in the workaday process of doing research. Assuming basic archiving ability, there is no risk of these ideas being lost to society even in a journal-free world. But if you don't believe me that journal articles are not isomorphic to shared knowledge, the proof is in the pudding: a fellow researcher will happily share his journal article (advertisement) with you, but ask for a copy of the lab notebook pages and you may be in for a chilly response.

by _dps 14y ago

Evbn 14y ago

Expanding knowledge without communicating it is useless, and salaried researchers should know that.

cma 14y ago
But parts of it can be a zero sum game, just like occurs between the marketing departments of Coke and Pepsi.
_dps 14y ago
This is pretty deep in the thread, but I'll bite because I have a few counterintuitive ideas I'd like to share. Apologies for the lengthy prose. > Expanding knowledge without communicating it is useless Perhaps controversially, I'm not sure I agree with this, at least not on the timescale of a singe person's career. Recording new knowledge is absolutely essential, and many important ideas in science were discovered or rediscovered by reading old personal notes of great scientists that never made it into a letter or article. Not even the most ardent publish-or-perish critics argue that researchers shouldn't record their ideas and findings somehow, and make those recordings available. But actually communicating the work in the present, rather than merely making it available in a recorded form, requires a willing recipient and a crafted message. So the focus on publication conflates the creation of good ideas with the ability to persuade others (and the readiness of others to be persuaded). You might say "Sure, that's also true everywhere else". Having been on both sides of the fence, my experience is that it's actually much less true everywhere else, precisely because research is so future-oriented. In most lines of work you are trying to get results today/tomorrow/this-quarter, and, while you always need to persuade in order to advance, you don't have to persuade about hypotheticals beyond your lifetime like "This theorem could become the basis for an entire field of mathematics someday". See, for example, the originally unpublished works of Karush (now at the heart of optimization theory) or Lyapunov (now the basis of much research on nonlinear systems). Both pursued their ideas for love of the ideas, and both were met with indifferent audiences. Changing the subject slightly, I submit that in many cases journal publications have evolved to be more advertising and less communication, particularly in the most prestigious journals which, for Moore-defying reasons, impose page limits and will not allow you to attach large images, data files, or programs. While not nearly as bad as patent descriptions, journal publications are almost never as useful in reproducing results as simply having the work artifacts of the research process: procedure pages from someone's lab notebook, program source code, raw data files unaltered by "smoothing for visualization", sensor/instrument configurations, the 20 line informal proof that inspired the 20 page formal proof that gets to a journal, etc. These kinds of artifacts are recorded by any researcher in the workaday process of doing research. Assuming basic archiving ability, there is no risk of these ideas being lost to society even in a journal-free world. But if you don't believe me that journal articles are not isomorphic to shared knowledge, the proof is in the pudding: a fellow researcher will happily share his journal article (advertisement) with you, but ask for a copy of the lab notebook pages and you may be in for a chilly response.