[HN Gopher] Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five d...
___________________________________________________________________
Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
Author : sebg
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-01-06 13:51 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| As an academic (CS), I'm able to write one or two decent papers a
| year, in a very good year, three.
|
| Looking at colleagues who write ten a year I already get
| existential angst, and have to actively tell myself that life is
| not a competition and some things are more important.
|
| Writing fifty (while also teaching, writing grants, mentoring
| students, etc.) seems mind-numbing, even just in terms of the
| relatively routine tasks of formatting or proofreading papers,
| aligning figures, corresponding with reviewers, editors, co-
| authors, etc.
| make3 wrote:
| they don't do any of those tasks though, people who do 50
| papers a year are in very senior roles & only mentor, attend a
| few meetings, read the paper once or twice at best and propose
| modifications maybe. the question of what constitutes
| authorship is really more the question here
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| The organization of knowledge production in different fields
| can be quite, well, different. If you had 2 post-docs and 8
| graduate students, and were collaborating with other labs as
| well, then papers per year would go up.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Michael Stonebraker referred to this as "Diarrhea of papers"
|
| https://www.idug.org/browse/blogs/blogviewer?blogkey=a7b6fe8...
|
| And he more or less says the focus on quantity has made the
| academic field (databases) irrelevant, because individual
| papers don't tell you anything useful. (Disclaimer: My
| interpretation of his talk, and I don't work in that field.)
| mirker wrote:
| My interpretation of his claim is it's no longer a good
| career move to focus on big-picture research. It's better to
| attack problems with narrow scope or superficial impact. Some
| of those papers are useful, but they're not the most
| important problems in practice.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| These are mostly people that are bossing other people around,
| and just review the work occasionally, not actually creating
| whole drafts.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Most won't know how or literally what to put down on a paper
| and who to send it to for publication.
|
| If you can independently write a paper you can supervise many
| more and provide valuable insight from your experience.
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| [flagged]
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| I used to think like that as a teenager, but honestly I think
| it is a self-limiting philosophy. Some may find extreme
| industriousness attractive though. In communist countries
| they used to give a "Stakhanov-prize" to people who produced
| the most items in a week or month.
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| [flagged]
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Aren't we all.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Can't tell if this is serious or satire. Well done.
| [deleted]
| isoprophlex wrote:
| That's not a very kind comment. You can, and should, do
| better than that to improve the level of discourse on this
| site above cheap, snarky "cope harder" swipes at someone.
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I need the source of this copy/pasta
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Never sure who the real winner is.
|
| https://youtu.be/JRWlnv0_svU
| candu wrote:
| For others replying here: looking through this user's comment
| history, pretty much all of their comments are equally snarky
| and troll-ish.
|
| For the parent: this is very much not appreciated here on HN.
| Take it elsewhere.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "and million of dollars of funding talks to your future wife,
| she will be in love with him and not you, so you lost the
| competition."
|
| Or not, because while you were always working, working,
| working, you never had the chance to build up a real
| relationship and that golddigger who does one day agree to
| merry you, will exploit you and leave you broken and divorced
| in a ditch, with children in therapy, because you noticed too
| late, because you were occupied.
|
| Life is also a competition, but not just that. Mainly it is
| about finding a healthy balance.
| wcarss wrote:
| In summary, once you remove large teams like in particle physics
| and biomedicine and long running major cohort studies, and fix
| the data for bad disambiguation of non-Western author names, you
| get down to around a hundred people.
|
| Of those, the most prolific authors are in countries that reward
| authorship with money, and so seem much more potentially related
| to corruption on average, and of the best sample of the
| remainder, most who bothered to respond in a survey aggreed they
| did not mostly meet all 4 of the somewhat-rigorous Vancouver
| criteria of authorship, like "substantially contributed to the
| idea of the paper" and "drafted most of the paper".
|
| The paper concludes, "ultimately you'd have to read an author's
| work to understand what they've actually done".
|
| So... this is kind of an interesting review of the data and why
| it may be what it is, but it seems like there are relatively few
| truly "hyper-prolific" (if any!) scientists out there.
|
| I'd be interested to see a much more rigorous study of the mid
| range of smaller fields: the authors who do contribute
| substantially to say, 10-15 papers a year for a few years. Who
| are they? What is their work, and maybe most interestingly: _how_
| do they work?
| lost_tourist wrote:
| You get down to 100 authors in countries like the US and China?
| No way. There are 1000+ significant scientists and acheivements
| easily
| Bedon292 wrote:
| This study is specifically about hyper prolific authors who
| have their name on 72 or more publications in a single year.
| Which they filtered down to a few hundred, and then a chunk
| of those were associated with large cohort studies. So the
| list does get down to around a hundred that aren't caught in
| one of those filters.
| tomlue wrote:
| wow, starting to feel like papers are not a good metric for
| scientific progress. Who would've thought...
| f1shy wrote:
| I work in a company where in the job description for some
| positions you have to show that you have a long publishing
| record... sighs...
|
| Great place to "work"...
| [deleted]
| bell-cot wrote:
| In Mathematics, there is Paul Erdos* - who published >1,500
| papers, with 500+ co-authors, in a ~65-year professional career.
| Though he is recognized as being very, _very_ unusual. And
| Mathematics has the huge advantage of not needing the labs,
| equipment, experiments, etc. that restrict pretty much any
| "science" to a far slower pace.
|
| *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Erd%C5%91s_num...
| wcoenen wrote:
| Erdos was also known to habitually take stimulants like
| benzedrine and ritalin.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| I think he was already quite prolific before that started.
|
| IMO, it is a bit of a myth that Adderall will make an already
| productive person more productive.
|
| However, stimulants do motivate compulsive behaviors and
| rigid thinking.
|
| That's where it would have helped Erdos. To just do math
| everyday and never be much interested in other pursuits takes
| something extra. Even into old age he didn't have anything
| else on the bucket list.
| make3 wrote:
| that's another thing, some people become so famous that having
| a paper with them is a big mark of prestige (erdos number), and
| people start to try to add them to papers they only marginally
| looked in the general direction of at best
| bell-cot wrote:
| Quite true. Though for Erdos, the huge number of coauthors
| was far more a side-effect of his, um, "extreme itinerant"
| professional lifestyle.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Also quite many of his papers are 1-2 pages long, without
| much of "motivation" or "context", in the form:
|
| - Here is a problem that was posed by ... . Here is our
| solution to it. Here are some follow-up questions.
|
| (Which is actually refreshing and nice, just different from
| a current typical paper.)
| bell-cot wrote:
| _Oh, yes._ The long and pompous drivel that scientific
| papers seem to be padded with these days makes me wonder
| if they 're all busy gaming "paper length" metrics,
| playing to an imagined audience of clueless could-be-
| donor billionaires, or what.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My A.I. looks at all the cs abstracts posted to arXiv
| every day, I skim maybe 50 of the abstracts and download
| maybe 15 PDFs.
|
| I am a little shocked at how many papers are fewer than
| four double-spaced pages, scarcely more than a tweet if
| you're trying to explain something that is fundamentally
| new to people who aren't intimately involved in that
| exact corner of that exact subfield.
|
| (If my metric for "quality" was "it might frontpage if
| posted to HN", the superficial characteristics of the
| paper would be "about 25 pages with a splashy image on
| the first page" but unfortunately you can't tell that
| from the abstract, but maybe you can get the number of
| pages and the content first page without downloading the
| whole PDF.)
| raybb wrote:
| For anyone interested in learning more about Erdos, he has a
| fascinating life story well told in _The Man Who Loved Only
| Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for
| Mathematical Truth_ by Paul Hoffman.
|
| It's available for free on Open Library:
| https://openlibrary.org/books/OL354306M/
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I got my phd in the humanities and from the outside the sciences
| have always looked like a pyramid scheme. I'm sure it isn't but
| it is hard to imagine actually collaborating with so many people
| on so many papers.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| A now-flagged sibling post objected to the description of
| academia as a pyramid scheme and asked how that description
| could be justified.
|
| If we're splitting hairs, it's closer to an MLM than it is to a
| Ponzi.
|
| Each professor has to run a lab, which requires several
| students. Those students are nominally being trained to become
| professors who will run their own labs, and so on.
|
| What this ignores (like MLMs) is that market saturation will
| ensue, and the "infinite chain" nature of recruitment cannot be
| continued once that point is hit. At equilibrium, each
| professor can have only one student over the course of their
| career. Or, allowing for losses to other fields, only a very
| few students. Certainly not enough to continue the prolific
| paper-mill output we see today.
|
| The system only continues to work today (and only in
| engineering and some sciences) because there is a large enough
| market for PhDs outside academia.
|
| In the humanities and arguably in physics, the system already
| does not work.
|
| To be as offensive as possible, it's as though a primitive
| people continued breeding beyond the carrying capacity of the
| land. Malthus says mortality will start going up. What we
| actually see, non-metaphorically, is serious distress from
| humanities PhDs who languish in poverty-level adjunct roles.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| "At equilibrium, each professor can have only one student
| over the course of their career. Or, allowing for losses to
| other fields, only a very few students. Certainly not enough
| to continue the prolific paper-mill output we see today."
|
| This problem is solved in part by most professors only
| working at undergraduate or Master's awarding institutions.
| If you limit Ph.D.s to R1s, then you can have big labs with
| many grad students at equilibrium.
|
| It's solved in another part by having both master's and
| doctoral students (allowing two* students per career at
| equilibrium), and by having post-docs (not a student,
| technically, but still a paper-miller). With a doctor
| typically now having two or three post-docs during a career
| this allows for an additional two or three paper-millers per
| career at equilibrium. And the post-docs are much better at
| producing papers than the students.
|
| It's solved in third part by exporting Ph.D.s.
|
| It's solved in a fourth part by the less frequent people who
| have multiple doctorates.
|
| And in a fifth part by incorporating the many more
| undergraduates in the research and paper producing apparatus.
|
| Is this unsustainable? Yes. And more importantly a bunch of
| it shouldn't be done. We should be publishing results updates
| in lieu of full papers, until enough results have accumulated
| for a good paper. But what have you.
|
| Edit to add a sixth part: Collaborating with a fellow
| professor who _does_ have a grad student.
|
| * - actually more than two, as there are typically more
| master's recipients than doctoral recipients.
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| [flagged]
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| There is a big difference between articles in humanities that
| are published and those published from labs. Humanities papers
| are way less templated and usually aren't co-authored in the
| same way as lab papers are. Humanities papers also often lead
| the reader through the research and argument, while lab papers
| often simply state findings or report results. Humanities
| publishing has its own....idiosyncrasies though, like how
| certain journals become private fiefdoms for certain
| intellectual movements or approaches that never subject
| themselves to real scrutiny. The same citing hijinks also
| happen. It's a very "I'll pat you on the back if you'll pat
| mine" system.
|
| There are also different expectations of style, for lack of a
| better word for it. Humanities papers are often held to certain
| aesthetic standards that are different than lab papers.
| nzach wrote:
| I found odd they choose not to talk about salami science[0].
|
| [0] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...
| whoevercares wrote:
| Publishing paper is a sort of training for PHD students. That's
| why there are many papers but rarely useful
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| I blame China. As a researcher in China, you were told to
| publish, as often as possible, OR ELSE. that's leads to a
| constant publishing of useless papers. China took the whole idea
| of "publish or perish" into overdrive.
| [deleted]
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Also here in Canada. Only the US is perfect!!11
|
| obvious /s
| stenl wrote:
| John PA Ioannidis, one of the authors of that paper (which is
| from 2018 btw) has published an average of 60 papers per year for
| the last decade, and more than 1100 in total (https://pubmed.ncbi
| .nlm.nih.gov/?term=Ioannidis+JPA&filter=d...). I'm pretty sure he
| doesn't even have time to read most of his own papers.
| londons_explore wrote:
| A paper is only a few pages long usually. A read of a paper
| takes perhaps half an hour. And in that time, you might even be
| able to check some references, make a few edits, or drop an
| email to someone to gather some more results for a figure or
| two.
|
| Doing this once a week seems very reasonable.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| Proof reading and correcting typos shouldn't be considered
| authoring, but it is what it is.
| dahinds wrote:
| A close reading of a scientific paper of any consequence does
| not take half an hour. These days a published paper may
| typically be only a few pages but it isn't at all uncommon
| for the paper to be accompanied by 20-50 pages of
| supplementary text. When I'm asked to review a paper it takes
| me the better part of a day, at least. If I were a senior
| author on that paper that would be the bare minimum that I'd
| consider an acceptable commitment of effort.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| "What the heck happened to John Ioannidis?" (about his
| publications during the Covid epidemic.)
| https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Nothing happened to Ioannidis. He did his job as a scientist
| and said what he thought was right, even when everybody
| disagreed with him.
|
| So he was wrong? So what? To be a scientist means to blunder
| a lot. In fact, to be a scientist means to (be willing to)
| blunder much, much more than everybody else because that is
| the only way to learn. Science, ultimately, only gives you
| the tools to know when you're _wrong_.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| He really lowered himself by personally attacking a grad
| student who opposed him - the very definition of punching
| down.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Well, he also decided it was appropriate to insult the
| physical appearance of grad students on twitter who
| disagreed with him. He definitely didn't come out of covid
| looking fully dispassionate.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I have no idea what incident you are talking about but,
| from the context, I have no doubt that it is something
| inconsequential that social media made a big deal about
| just to have some reason to be outraged at Ioannidis,
| with whom they were already outraged.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I didn't say you should be outraged. Feel what you want
| to feel. I list this example where he definitely did more
| than "his job as a scientist."
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Passion is fine and great in all endeavors. Not being
| able to acknowledge when you are wrong in small or large
| is the problem. And it's a problem for both passionate
| and dispassionate people.
|
| One of the earlier researchers on psychopaths was Hervey
| M. Cleckley. In his book on the topic _The Mask of
| Sanity_ one of his vignettes of, I believe, "incomplete
| manifestation of psychopathology" was of a psychologist
| who gave public lectures on psychopaths, without
| apparently recognizing that he was almost one of them.
|
| To sum up the parallel, there are two kinds of people who
| tend to talk the most about any social or personal ill:
| those who are worried about the ill, and those who are
| distracting from the fact that they themselves embody it.
| (Technically this probably overlaps a bit, as ex-
| alcoholics are often worried about alcoholism, for
| example.)
| lliamander wrote:
| > He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully
| dispassionate.
|
| No one did.
|
| That said, despite the serious amount of professional
| scrutiny and and public harassment he was subject to, I
| think he made valuable contributions to the conversation
| around COVID-19 public policy.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I think the preamble of the article you linked is important
| for the consideration of others in opening the link:
|
| "John Ioannidis is one of the most published and influential
| scientists in the world, someone whose skewering of bad
| medical research we at SBM have frequently lauded over the
| years. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Since then, Prof.
| Ioannidis has been publishing dubious studies that minimize
| the dangers of the coronavirus, shown up in the media to
| decry "lockdowns," and, most recently, "punched down",
| attacking a graduate student for having criticized him. What
| happened? Did Prof. Ioannidis change, or was he always like
| this and I just didn't see it? Either way, he's a cautionary
| tale of how even science watchdogs can fall prey to hubris."
|
| Great find.
| rockostrich wrote:
| It looks like he's second to last or last author on most of
| those papers which typically means he's the advisor for the
| graduate student/post-doc that's actually doing the work. It's
| still an insane number of papers to be a part of but
| considering Ioannidis is director of the Prevention Research
| Center and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center
| at Stanford it's not really that insane.
| __seka__ wrote:
| > Prevention Research Center and co-director of the Meta-
| Research Innovation Center at Stanford
|
| Aren't those roles supposed to hold a significant amount of
| responsibility and therefore require a certain level of
| commitment? A day has only 24 hours. How much time do you
| think someone in such a position can dedicate to reviewing
| papers?
| borroka wrote:
| There are also incentives for others to include him as a co-
| author despite the fact that, presumably, he has come nowhere
| near the minimum work that would be expected to allow him to
| be included as such.
|
| The question "Did you publish a paper with [famous
| scientist/researcher]" is not too different from the question
| "Did you go to dinner with [famous actress/entertainer/]" in
| other contexts. The give some clout, recognition, some minor
| envy from others.
| 323 wrote:
| It takes a scammer to spot a scammer.
|
| If you know that there is wide spread fraud in science, and you
| know how it's done, why not profit and publish a paper on it?
| macleginn wrote:
| That sweet bullet point from the Vancouver criteria: 'Agreement
| to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that
| questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the
| work are appropriately investigated and resolved.'
|
| Seems to be nearly universally violated, no matter how many
| authors a paper has.
| jononomo wrote:
| I was recently listening to a podcast in which a professor was
| introduced as being the author of over 250 articles. I
| immediately discounted the guy as likely an unserious thinker.
| (It was Tim Rasinski being interviewed on The Literacy View
| podcast). Sure enough, he didn't impress me at all as the
| interview progressed -- apparently he is just a guy who has
| learned how to play the academic game and can't think critically.
| graymatters wrote:
| It's time to do something about that. Isn't it time to have two
| categories of authorship on (scientific) papers - authors and
| enablers? The latter is for people who organized, supervised and
| otherwise enabled the work etc.
|
| Other suggestions how to address the problem are welcome.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Some PhD advisors often simply turn down being a co-author,
| even if they contributed some crucial help or idea. Sometimes
| it is modesty or generosity, sometimes a gentle way to say the
| work is not very good :)
|
| More seriously, the solution is not to use content-oblivious
| measures (e.g. number of papers/citations) when evaluating
| researchers.
| DiscoDays wrote:
| How would you formulate what the problem is and why it is time
| to do something about it?
| canjobear wrote:
| In many fields there is an informal distinction based on author
| position. The first author(s) likely did most of the work
| and/or wrote the paper. The last author(s), usually called
| senior authors, are the ones who organized, supervised, etc.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Not surprising at all. It reflects a shift in science to one-two
| people endeavours to group work.
|
| If you use someone's lab, or you take up time they are paid for
| or that uses a grant they need to be able to reflect that in
| publications.
| elashri wrote:
| > The vast majority of hyperprolific authors (7,888 author
| records, 86%) published in physics. In high-energy and particle
| physics, projects are done by large international teams that can
| have upwards of 1,000 members. All participants are listed as
| authors as a mark of membership of the team, not for writing or
| revising the papers. We therefore excluded authors in physics.
|
| While this is true in general, I'm part of one of these
| Collaboration at LHC and I find that publishing a paper is taking
| a lot of effort and revision (not talking about actual research)
| and would involve a couple of hundred people between the review
| committee, physics group and the collaboration at large who post
| questions, comments and revise every bit of information. It is
| amazing to always see how to final product is almost very
| different from the first draft in each aspect. This process on
| average takes a couple of months. I will confess that I'm guilty
| of not participating into this duty for each paper but I'm always
| sure that there are many people who will do that.
|
| Regarding authorship for papers I did not involve in writing
| directly, I'm fine with that norm in our field because that's
| fair. Most of the work needed to produce results is not doing the
| actual analysis for the data but operating this huge machine and
| the service work (software development, control room shifts,
| hardware R&D Data quality ...etc) is most of the work.
|
| People usually find this strange (more polite description of them
| saying it is absurd) but let's be real. The era of individual
| contribution (or small group) in experimental particle physics
| had almost ended by the cathode rays.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| "and would involve a couple of hundred people between the
| review committee, physics group and the collaboration at large
| who post questions, comments and revise every bit of
| information."
|
| I'm curious whether much of this work materially differs from
| the work done by peer reviewers in the journal review process.
| If it does then authorship may be fine, if it doesn't then it
| seems that either the internal reviewers should be separately
| listed on the article as reviewers instead of authors, or that
| a journal's peer reviewers should also be listed as authors.
|
| "Regarding authorship for papers I did not involve in writing
| directly, I'm fine with that norm in our field because that's
| fair. Most of the work needed to produce results is not doing
| the actual analysis for the data but operating this huge
| machine and the service work (software development, control
| room shifts, hardware R&D Data quality ...etc) is most of the
| work."
|
| Whenever I do this kind of work and am offered an authorship I
| ask for an acknowledgement instead. It's akin to me to citing
| the company you purchased your equipment and reagents from
| (actually designing and constructing your equipment is an
| important part of the job, too). You cite them, you don't add
| them as a co-author.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Well, quite obviously the peer reviewers the journal selects
| can't be from inside the experiment, and are thus frequently
| less well informed than collaboration members on which bugs
| in the software to look out for for example.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| How well informed is Random Undergrad Co-Author? And why
| should being informed on something lead to an authorship?
| To relate again to material purchases, often enough
| researchers ask the commercial tech support for details on
| using the equipment or reagents. This still doesn't make
| the tech support person a co-author.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| It definitely feels a little odd. If everyone is an author,
| then does authorship really matter?
|
| Is authorship broken out in any way? I would think it could be
| useful to do something like credits on a movie. Here are the
| writers, the directors, the producers. And then here is the
| lighting team, and this team worked on these special effects,
| this other team on these other effects, etc.
| dguest wrote:
| To answer your second question: no.
|
| On a few of the biggest experiments the author list is
| completely flat and alphabetical. From outside the
| collaborations there's no way to know who actually wrote the
| paper or did any of the work described therein.
|
| The best argument to keep it this way is that fewer people
| fight about who gets credit. But anyone with internal access
| and a bit of experience knows where to look. If you want to
| verify someone's contribution from the outside, you just have
| to find one of the other 3000 authors and ask them to do some
| sleuthing.
|
| Personally I'd answer "no" to your first question too, but
| that's a bit more subjective and depends on the funding
| agency. Particle physicists have, for better or worse, thrown
| a wrench into the whole idea of authorship metrics, but they
| did so in a way that would benefit them by default: if the
| funding agency has a publication quota, everyone passes!
|
| Of course this causes a few problems:
|
| - If your funding agency hasn't caught on and you aren't in
| particle physics, you are effectively being cheated out of a
| better ranking.
|
| - Many agencies are now disqualifying publications with over
| 1000 authors, in which case particle physicists get zero
| publications.
|
| To deal with the second case, it's actually quite common to
| see smaller groups of scientists from these collaborations
| writing papers using their own simulated data, as a way to
| get publications with fewer authors. I would definitely count
| myself in the group that considers this situation absurd, but
| that's where we are.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Often the core team gets to be the corresponding authors.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Up next: ScienceGPT
| beAbU wrote:
| I guess you don't know about SciGen:
| https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
| kmoser wrote:
| That site gives an Internal Server Error after submitting the
| form.
| amelius wrote:
| This is how many PIs treat their students: as an AI tool with
| paper writing capabilities.
|
| The upside: soon we can all be PIs!
| culebron21 wrote:
| I've read a huge book [1] of a broad research on universities in
| different countries, and this is what the book told.
|
| Science metrics, when used to determine scientific significance
| by government officials, become abused. This law was articulated
| back in 1920s, if I remember correctly. And this is one of the
| cases.
|
| Science was not like this until quite recently -- citation
| metrics were first used in the 1980s by neoliberal government of
| the UK (because those in the libertarian political spectrum tend
| to distrust public sector and love _efficiency_).
|
| The idea behind the use of citation ratings was to determine more
| efficient universities and support them. According to recent
| studies, this hasn't changed the hierarchy of universities in the
| UK -- it preserved it and actually made more rigid.
|
| As a side effect, there's this publications race.
|
| Still, British academia is rather modest in ratings: it only uses
| them to evaluate all university or a faculty. In countries that
| are trying to catch up in science, metrics are applied at the
| level of an individual researcher, and make bonuses or position
| depend on it. They demand a certain lever of a citation index,
| and demand papers published in journals no lower than Nth
| quartile in some ranking.
|
| This basically means you must abandon teaching, join as co-author
| on as many papers as possible. If one makes any good research,
| they usually split it into several papers over couple of years --
| because bonuses.
|
| Some join so-called citation cartels, and this is probably one of
| them.
|
| [1] https://ecsoc.hse.ru/en/2016-17-4/192208750.html
| [deleted]
| version_five wrote:
| I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including
| many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge
| of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I
| believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written
| sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and
| organizing the research as well as challenging the results and
| strengthening the presentation of the paper. So he was probably
| on 20-30 papers a year.
|
| In my view this was completely above board, it's the role of a
| research leader and warrants co-authorship. I don't consider this
| situation particularly exceptional and I can easily imagine that
| number going much higher with more organization and focus
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| I was in a similar group a decade ago. At the time, I found it
| impressive and efficient, but looking back now, I find much of
| those papers not to amount to much. I wonder what your
| experience is: were those 30 papers per year good science
| overall?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm not sure what to compare against. Of course most research
| papers don't amount to much, but are the ones produced by big
| groups with only a little hands-on work by the professors
| much worse on average, I wonder?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| The pressure to publish tends to lead to many smaller papers,
| instead of, say, a longer monograph that collates it. Indeed,
| multiple publications are often made using parts of the same
| data-set (given how much effort and cost it is to run a
| study, there is often an incentive to get more data than
| less, particularly in the clinical and psychological
| sciences).
|
| It is unfortunate in many ways (not all).
| foobarian wrote:
| Not OP but a thing to consider: the training the junior
| members gain from the process is valuable too. Those 30
| papers may not amount to much, but if even one of the primary
| authors ends up with Nobel-caliber work once in their career,
| was that worth it?
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Are those junior members learning to do Nobel-caliber work
| or are they learning to pad their CVs by publishing tons of
| low-impact papers?
| version_five wrote:
| Are those the only two options?
| foobarian wrote:
| Therein lies the rub. It depends a lot on the person.
| There are tons of tenured professors who kick back and
| don't do much, and then there are those who can't help
| but keep working hard. I think the hope is that you will
| luck into getting some of the latter in your group, so
| even if training the others might end up a waste, some
| will end up successful. Kind of like the VC model.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > if even one of the primary authors ends up with Nobel-
| caliber work once in their career, was that worth it?
|
| It would seem likely that the answer to that is yes, and
| that none got the prize and it wasn't worth it.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Most research amounts to nothing. It's why they call it
| research. But we can't get the 1% of breakthroughs without
| the 4% of hits, 93% meh's, and 2% frauds. Not to mention that
| much published research is mistaken.
|
| Above all, it's hard (at least in the sciences). So anyone
| willing to follow the scientific method and package their
| results into a whitepaper is doing good science. The
| scientific method is ultimately the only requirement.
| borroka wrote:
| The fact that most research, dare I say by definition, has
| little value is true. The fact that most published papers
| have no value is also true.
|
| It is also true that some (published) research may go
| unnoticed and be discovered or rediscovered (much of
| science is the rediscovery of ideas that were once
| speculative and then became valuable because of a change in
| methods, technology, paradigm) later on. It is a rare
| occurrence, though, which does not justify the hours,
| money, energy spent on endeavors that everyone knows are,
| to the greater community of scientists, researchers, and
| citizens, meaningless and worthless.
|
| But part of the currency used in science is the number of
| papers, place of publication, citations received and
| overall impact on the field of the papers, and the deluge
| of worthless articles and research is a direct effect of
| the metrics chosen to evaluate scientists.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > The fact that most published papers have no value is
| also true.
|
| Is that true though? If I'm about to embark on a bit of
| extensive research, the first bit of that research would
| be to see if someone else has already done it. If they
| have, then there's value to me in not having to spend
| time/money in repeating what someone else has already
| done. Or it could show me where other things can be tried
| instead of just repeating. If we know 999 ways on how not
| to build a light bulb, we can scratch one more method off
| by seeing what other people have published.
|
| How is that not considered value?
| borroka wrote:
| You are referring to the publication of "negative
| results", which are of course informative, although
| rarely published due to a bias shown by journal editors
| and scientists themselves towards "positive results",
| that is results supporting the hypothesis tested.
| Negative results are published, yes, but in the context
| of popular or highly contested hypotheses or models.
| That's valuable research.
|
| Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers
| testing hypotheses nobody is interested about,
| theoretical work that looks like more abstract art than
| science, p-hacking, work that starts with corrupted,
| unreliable, badly collected data, and so on. Work that
| has no value other than that provided to the authors by
| the fact that they have produced a piece of "scientific
| currency".
|
| I must say that at least 1/3 of my conspicuous scientific
| output was of very limited value. Unfortunately, I cannot
| go back in time and spend my valuable time and energy on
| more valuable research.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers
| testing hypotheses nobody is interested about
|
| I broadly agree with you, but this point is probably
| mistaken in an illuminating way. The path to breakthrough
| science sometimes passes through uninteresting work. Few
| scientists were interested in natural selection before
| Darwin and his contemporary. There are many other
| examples.
| borroka wrote:
| We are talking about different things. We know about
| speculative research (which I referred to in my first
| comments), which gets discovered later on because of new
| methods, technologies, changes of paradigm. It rarely
| happens, and it makes a "splash" because it is good
| narrative and it is unlikely. But it happened, no doubt.
|
| I am talking about, just to offer an example, the vast
| majority of research that is published (please take this
| as a gross simplification) in journals with impact
| factors that start with a zero, theoretical work that re-
| invents linear regression, work based on data collected
| like a stream collects rain during a storm, that is
| everything gets in unfiltered.
|
| The justification for thousands and thousands of
| worthless articles published worldwide every year cannot
| be, "maybe among them there is the next natural
| selection-like theory of evolution that will
| revolutionize our understanding of the world". But
| unfortunately, left unchecked, scientific production has
| increased tremendously in volume, and I am quite
| confident that increase did not lead to an increase in
| "good science".
| version_five wrote:
| I think they followed a bell curve. They were all legitimate
| science - I don't pretend that this was a world leading lab,
| but it was a decent one and we mostly published in the
| field's main few journals. I don't believe the volume had any
| negative impact on the quality, if anything it made it better
| because metrics being what they are we had good grant money
| coming in and got good people and equipment.
|
| And as the sibling pointed out, all of us students had great
| opportunities to write and submit papers and conferences. I
| had peers in grad school with very conservative supervisors
| that didn't want to publish very much (I can think of one
| prof in particular who was undoubtedly a very good researcher
| and infrequenty published very good papers). This can be a
| disservice to students who don't get the same experience, and
| it's an argument for why publication count is a good metric
| (even though it's obviously flawed)
| sfpotter wrote:
| What field?
| lost_tourist wrote:
| So I still don't understand why these professors don't have
| their name second after the student author. It's still
| prestigious to guiding some of the best minds but also very
| honest, maybe even have a special symbol to indicate it as such
| in parenthesis.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| I am sure it can be different everywhere, but at least my
| advisor in grad school was great about making sure the
| students were ahead of him in the list. The student(s) who
| were primarily responsible were first and then he would be on
| it after.
|
| Out of curiosity I checked and he has 161 publications on
| Google Scholar. Of the publications with multiple authors he
| is first author on only 7 of them. And then 7 are single
| author.
| pvaldes wrote:
| This is the standard protocol
| mdturnerphys wrote:
| In the fields of physics I'm familiar with the group leader
| is usually listed last on papers. They get credit wherever
| they are in the author list, while being first or second
| author carries more cachet for students and postdocs who are
| trying to establish their careers.
| yread wrote:
| Indeed not surprising at all. Some of our facility people (like
| sequencing or biobanking) insist that you add them as coauthor
| if the facility did some work for you
| dalbasal wrote:
| Above board, perhaps.
|
| This way of researching and publish does, OTOH, mean something
| quite different from science of the past. This isn't applying
| the method more efficiently. It's applying a different method.
|
| Reading old papers, you know who they were written by. These
| days, authorship doesn't mean that anymore. It's more like
| credits in a movie than a signature on a painting.
| GalenErso wrote:
| Related.
|
| The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that
| nobody reads: https://archive.vn/N6Gvy
|
| Does Anyone Ever Read PDFs? https://priceonomics.com/does-anyone-
| ever-read-pdfs/
|
| "Nearly one-third of World Bank reports have never been
| downloaded, not even once."" "Over 30% of the 1,611 policy
| reports published from 2008 to 2012 were never downloaded. As
| each report costs an average of $180,000 in terms of researchers'
| time and other expenses, a ballpark estimate of the amount of
| money spent researching and writing reports that did not merit a
| single download is $93 million. In addition, 87% of the reports
| went uncited."
|
| Dear Think Tanks: Nobody is Reading Your PDFs:
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dear-think-tanks-nobody-readi...
|
| World Bank learns most PDFs it produces go unread:
| https://www.smh.com.au/world/world-bank-learns-most-pdfs-it-...
| Aunche wrote:
| It's depressing that despite how much information is
| painstakingly gathered, available for free on the internet,
| people still choose to get their information about economics
| and policy from memes that have no basis on reality. For
| example, whenever you see someone mention the World Bank's
| studies of the reduction, you'll inevitably see a highly
| upvoted response of how this is actually bad because it means
| subsidence farmers' livelyhoods are being replaced by
| sTArVatION wAGeS. However, if they bothered to read the source,
| they'd know that the international poverty isn't measured by
| wages at all but by consumption.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Nearly one-third of World Bank reports have never been
| downloaded, not even once.
|
| This surprises me... At the very least, most search engines
| download PDF's to index them. And the web archive crawler would
| probably be expected to visit something like the world bank
| too. And I would guess most governments around the world would
| have a team of economists which would be expected to have read
| reports by the world bank.
|
| I can only suspect they were hidden away behind a login-wall or
| deliberately obscure because they contained information that
| officially had to be public, but someone wanted to not be
| revealed.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The counts were determined using a web analytics package
| which presumably can separate crawler downloads from real
| users.
| rhacker wrote:
| If you have a ton of clinical data on random people, the
| medicines they have been prescribed, ailments, procedures, etc...
| it makes sense that blasting millions of queries at that data
| will produce many papers in medicine for tons of conditions.
| snapcaster wrote:
| So what's going on here? It seems fraudulent but also "published
| paper" and "authorship" seems to be poorly defined terms with no
| clear consensus on what it means
| jonp888 wrote:
| Here's a quick guide:
| https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=562
| Maken wrote:
| This is painfully accurate.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| When you get a certain level of academic inertia (tons of
| postdocs under you etc), you get author credit even when you
| don't actively participate in the research or writing itself.
| What's more interesting is how many _first author_ papers are
| published per year, per author. First author is typically
| reserved for someone who did a significant amount of the work
| on the paper.
| rjmunro wrote:
| But sometimes it is reserved for the person whose name
| happens to come first in the alphabet:
|
| https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/29/al.
| ..
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| But determining first authorship itself is non-trivial, as
| different fields and different journals have different
| conventions and norms.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| Yep, not to mention many groups will list new members
| higher up so they get cred faster
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Basically its mostly people in powerful positions that use
| their power to convert minor contributions to paper credit.
|
| There's a list of self reported reasons how they achieve this
| seemingly high productivity, and the most honest bit is
| probably:
|
| * mentorship of very many young researchers
|
| * leadership of a research team, or even of many teams
|
| * extensive collaboration
|
| * working on multiple research areas or in core services
|
| * availability of suitable extensive resources and data
|
| * culmination of a large project
|
| with the latter points giving more transient productivity.
| adg001 wrote:
| Sure. Publishing means having your name listed among the authors.
| This does not necessarily translate in the production of results,
| or in the active participation in the writing process.
|
| An interesting statistic would be the number of scientists who
| are able to publish a paper every five days or so, while going
| solo in their work. Essentially nobody, I suppose, for so many
| reasons I will not list here.
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