5 ms·
I'd say that lack of references is more often a sign of ignorance than innovation. I see that every day; transformative work like John Nash's thesis only come
by jedbrown 11y ago
I'd say that lack of references is more often a sign of ignorance than innovation. I see that every day; transformative work like John Nash's thesis only come along once in a while.
- sitkack 11y agoThe way we publish research is broken. So much prior art goes unpublished because it is never accepted by a journal. Negative results, meh results, and flawed research all have value. Proper citation is often difficult but can be as important as the work itself, other wise the knowledge graph is fractured.
- zootar 11y agoYou're not in academia, are you? There're hundreds of obscure journals and conferences with very low standards. As long as you choose venues that are within your league, you can publish anything that remotely resembles research, and it will show up on Google Scholar. A new academic paper is published every 15 seconds, and most of them are "negative results, meh results, and flawed research".
- robotresearcher 11y agoVery, very few of them are negative results. People just don't write those papers.
- zootar 11y agoMost of them are negative results, though usually not overtly presented as such. In my experience, it's extremely rare for a researcher to throw away months of hard work because the result is null. They almost always find a way to augment it or spin it, write up the paper with the phrase "more research is needed" in the conclusion, and submit to a mediocre venue.
- robotresearcher 11y agoCan you give an example, because I have seen very few papers with negative or 'null' results. I'm not even sure what 'null' results means.
- zootar 11y agoNull means "without value, effect, consequence, or significance; being or amounting to nothing". Google "reproducibility crisis", "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ionnadis, "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Gelman.