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The problem is that science for many scientists is the business of persuading reviewers and editors, publishing positive results on a regular basis and spending
by return0 13y ago
The problem is that science for many scientists is the business of persuading reviewers and editors, publishing positive results on a regular basis and spending the rest of the time writing grant proposals.
This has to do with the publishing process itself, and the poor peer review (closed, sloppy, even for "respectable" journals) of the current publishing system. Science nowadays generates large amounts of knowledge, not all of which is useful, but we lack even rudimentary tools to catalog and analyze that information.
Very few people have suggested ways to catalog science in ways that are useful to inform future research[1,2].
[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-tools-to-manage-information-overload-threatening-neuroscience http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-tools-to-manage-information-ov...
[2] http://www.silvalab.com.cnchost.com/silvapapers/S2Neuron2013.pdf http://www.silvalab.com.cnchost.com/silvapapers/S2Neuron2013...
- waltherg 13y agoAmen. In my experience academic research is very different from what the wider public thinks it is. You sometimes ask yourself: Would the public continue throwing their taxes at scientific research if they knew that most of their cash is just consumed to fuel the egos of professors?
- mathattack 13y agoThis is true above and beyond just science. I get the need for research. I get the idea of pushing the boundary of knowledge, checked by peer review. The current system just seems very broken. People respond well to incentives, and they're incented to publish novel results no matter what. All this on the back of a lot of grad students, most of which whom will struggle to get jobs.
- fnl 13y agoI could not agree more to your description of what the life after your PhD seems to be. The only other workday activities you are missing out are probably (a) travelling, meetings, and conferences [lots] and (b) reading papers [hundreds/year]. However, I fail to see how "research maps" would improve our way to catalog and analyze information. What is shown in your ref [1] is a regulatory network. These models have been used for years to drive research into diseases ranging from cancer to neurodegenerative diseases. And, there is (at least in the biomedical sciences) a very vibrant community dedicated to that very job, the "bio-curators" [http://www.biocurator.org/ http://www.biocurator.org/] that directly or indirectly fill (relational) bio-repositories. "Research maps" like STRING, Reactome, PIR, BioCyc, or KEGG, to name a few, have been around for quite a while, too. So I think the claim in [1] that Silva has "invented" "research maps" is a quite some PR exaggeration, as this can be simply described as a "Reactome limited to Neuroscientists only".
- return0 13y agoAgree it's not a better solution, it's just that there is little talk of it in general. Paywalled science plays a big role here, it basically makes it impossible to gather even paper titles for further analysis.
- pron 13y agoI would propose an even more "meta" categorization. Research should be categorized into 'A' level and 'B' level. B level would mean that the purpose of this research is to explore an hypothesis and suggest directions for further research, while A level would mean an attempt at conclusive (or as close to conclusive as possible) results after enough B level research has been done in a certain field. B research would encompass what we suspect and/or want to examine; A research would encompass what we claim to know.