13 ms·

The implication that scientists compete due to their egos is not totally accurate. Yes, some do have egos, but like the programming world many are just geeky ty

• paulbaumgart 18y ago
  Could it be enforced, or at least encouraged, by the funding agencies? That still leaves the problem of reputation-building; a paper where an individual is only one of 20 authors probably isn't so impressive on a CV.
  • scott_s 18y ago
    Not just reputation building, but getting the researcher merit badge in the first place - the PhD. A PhD dissertation is expected to be the work of the student; it's supposed to prove that the student can do self-directed, novel research in their field. Of course, people do defend dissertations based on work that was a collaboration with others, but I think we're considering a level of collaboration not usually seen.
  • azanar 18y ago
    That still leaves the problem of reputation-building; a paper where an individual is only one of 20 authors probably isn't so impressive on a CV. Is the effort expended for the paper able to be divided cleanly into chunks 1/20th the size, to be credited to each author in turn? Doing research, or any creative work, is not a manufacturing process; the output does not inevitably scale linearly based on the number of inputs. It is possible that a paper could describe something that was very impressive for 20 people to accomplish.
    • etal 18y ago
      The papers I've seen that have more than a dozen or so authors often work like this: The first and second authors were the project drivers, and did the writeup; the names in the middle were involved in data collection, number-cruching or sub-projects, and are often distributed across different organizations; and the last author (or two) will be a very well-known name, someone who has basically blessed the project by granting their name to it as an established researcher in the area, but who most likely only advised the main researchers. In general it only counts on your CV if you're the first, second, or maybe third author. But a project with 20 people on it would probably collapse under the organizational weight before completion if it wasn't a pretty big deal. For example, the papers on the Human Genome Project and shotgun sequencing had a lot of authors, with the breakdown as described above.
• azanar 18y ago
  When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create competition and moreover you are rewarding the people who are the most competitive. This seems ridiculously inefficient. The belief that two people spending money and effort to keep at odds with one another is beneficial and furthers advancement more rapidly than collaboration seems broken. With all of that waste, I can't understand how anyone at the funding agency can say they are getting the most return on investment following this strategy. A more collaborative model would give them the dual benefit of not having all of this in-fighting waste, while at the same time benefiting from the super-linear growth in results by having two people bang heads together. I sense a sacred cow here. As for how it can be done, what about allowing funding agencies to grant money to something akin to a research project trusts or foundations; something that spans multiple individuals and even multiple institutions, so the lines don't have to be drawn so sharply on who can participate and who can't. Something like the foundation model several OSS projects have adopted, perhaps.
  • frossie 18y ago
    Inefficient doesn't begin to describe it. The thing to remember is there's no money in OSS to first approximation - and you don't need money to write OSS. The problem is, you need a lot of money to do science, at least certain kinds of science. So here is how it works in practice. Say you have an idea on how to make a breakthrough on topic X. You figure you need to pay a research assistant for a year, or buy a week on some instrument, or whatever. Either way, say you need 50K. Case 1: You are the only person who wants 50K to do X, you need to convince the agency that X needs doing. This is an advantageous situation to you and depends on only you having the X idea, so you become very closed source about it. This is sub-optimal because it delays people looking into X. Also it is a turnoff to the kind of people who are interested in science and not skullduggery. Case 2. X is in fact a compelling avenue of research, so three people apply to the funding agency for 50K. This is the situation I was describing upthread - now these people have to compete, and prove that they are the best positioned to get an an answer to X if only you give them the 50K. This is suboptimal because by definition 2 out of 3 applicants wasted their time applying for X. Think of the comparison with YC - the startups who get turned down by YC have other options for getting money; moreover they only have the one project they need to worry about getting funded. Whereas a research scientist typically only has one source of money, but many lines of inquiry. This is why scientific seniority often means the death of research time, with people spending large amounts of time on the scatter shot approach - apply to the funding agency for 8-9 projects in the hope that 1-2 will get funded, because if the agency doesn't fund you for something you get to lose your staff and then you are nowhere. The situation becomes worse if what you need is not 50K but 50M, say to build a new instrument. Now your agency can't afford that at all, so the only way to get the money is to form an inter-agency (typically international) collaboration. Now the real inefficiency nightmare comes in; because what the other agencies buy with their money is the right of their people to work on the project. So not only the project becomes a sprawling nightmare, but the rules typically are than if Timbuktu brings 10M out of 50M to the table, they get to do 20% of the work on building the instrument - quite irrespective of whether they are the most qualified people to be doing so. As I said, I do not know what the answer is. The reason the situation is like that is an honest attempt by the agencies to be responsible with taxpayer money; the money is not infinite; they have to decide who to give the money to; and they feel, for reasons that are obvious, that competition is the best way to make sure that the money goes to the best person. I don't think anybody working in science would claim the system is perfect, but other workable solutions are not forthcoming.