[HN Gopher] The fight against fake-paper factories that churn ou...
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       The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2021-03-23 21:36 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
       | To some extent, if, as a journal, you have to start policing
       | submissions in the ways described, you have already lost. In that
       | so much of the journal industry is not about sharing knowledge,
       | but about generating a metric (publication count) for profit.
       | Rather than create more hoops that are only going to push good
       | science away to other venues, they should reconsider what they
       | are trying to accomplish overall, and where appropriate, go out
       | of business.
       | 
       | I feel like this is less a problem of serious science (where it's
       | generally known what authors and journals are reliable, and where
       | people using the results of others know enough to subject them to
       | scruitiny). It is a problem of the publishing industry and of
       | evaluating academics for tenure and promotion.
        
       | erostrate wrote:
       | Is there a good analysis somewhere of pragmatism in Chinese
       | culture?
       | 
       | It seems that there is a particular brand of ultra-pragmatism and
       | rule-gaming that is overrepresented in China.
       | 
       | Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that
       | appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else.
       | Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product
       | that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else.
       | 
       | I don't mean to stereotype all of China negatively. I've worked
       | with enough amazing Chinese colleagues to understand this is not
       | all of China. I'm just curious if this pattern has some truth to
       | it or if it's just a random racist stereotype, and how it can be
       | explained.
        
       | ceejayoz wrote:
       | > Physicians in China are a particular target market because they
       | typically need to publish research articles to gain promotions,
       | but are so busy at hospitals that they might not have time to do
       | the science, says Chen. Last August, the Beijing municipal health
       | authority published a policy stipulating that an attending
       | physician wanting to be promoted to deputy chief physician must
       | have at least two first-author papers published in professional
       | journals; three first-author papers are required to become a
       | chief physician. These titles affect a physician's salary and
       | authority, as well as the surgeries they are allowed to perform,
       | says Changqing Li, a former senior physician and gastroenterology
       | researcher at a Chinese hospital who now lives in the United
       | States.
       | 
       | "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
       | measure." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-23 23:00 UTC)