An end to publish or perish?

cyberwolf77

Ok, maybe not. However this does raise some very interesting questions about the viability of getting researchers off the hamster wheel of chasing grants.
https://boingboing.net/2016/08/10/why-did-it-take-a-private-foun.html

Black Swan

"Publish or perish" is still very much alive in universities and their labs, and your CV better have several grants and top ranked journal publications in your discipline if you wish to be taken seriously for tenure and promotion at flagship universities. As for getting the manuscript out in a timely fashion, journal submissions can take months, and sometimes rejections and resubmissions delay the release of results even longer.

In terms of grants, we have had several state, federal, NGO, and private sector research grants in recent years. Some of our private sector grants have allowed open and public dissemination of data, while others have been closed (i.e., private; proprietary). Primary data collections often fall under intellectual property, unless otherwise specified by the funding source; while secondary and big data were generally open to the public, or can be otherwise purchased for a fee.

There was another reason to use and publish the results from researches in a timely fashion. Primary data sets overtime can become stale, and sometimes useless if held from dissemination too long.

cyberwolf77

http://www.newsweek.com/autocomplete-scientific-paper-512667?rx=us

Black Swan

cyberwolf77 wrote: »

http://www.newsweek.com/autocomplete-scientific-paper-512667?rx=us

Once again, publish or perish is very much alive and well if you are tenure-track and wish to get tenure and promotion at flagship universities. As to the sometimes obscure disciplinary bound language used in scholarly papers and publications, many granting authorities have requested two versions of research results, one disciplinary and one written in common language, especially if some or all the grant monies had originated from taxpayers.

Tom Dunne

I think this is just a very good example of a very bad conference, with little or no academic rigour.

Look at the wording of the email. The trigger word for me is "kindly". This suggests to me that the originator of the acceptance email is a non-native English speaker, most likely with little or no knowledge of academic rigour, whose salary depends on the number of participants that he or she gets to attend. I've first hand experience of such people and such conferences.

So I do not accept that this is a robust example of the end of publish or perish.

cyberwolf77

Tom Dunne wrote: »

I think this is just a very good example of a very bad conference, with little or no academic rigour.

Look at the wording of the email. The trigger word for me is "kindly". This suggests to me that the originator of the acceptance email is a non-native English speaker, most likely with little or no knowledge of academic rigour, whose salary depends on the number of participants that he or she gets to attend. I've first hand experience of such people and such conferences.

So I do not accept that this is a robust example of the end of publish or perish.

Raises the question though, how long until someone writes a program that can generate research papers?

Tom Dunne

cyberwolf77 wrote: »

Raises the question though, how long until someone writes a program that can generate research papers?

I am sure I could knock together a software program that could generate a research paper, with the proper structure, syntax and references.

The question is whether somebody can knock together a research paper that will stand up to academic scrutiny.

cyberwolf77

Tom Dunne wrote: »

I am sure I could knock together a software program that could generate a research paper, with the proper structure, syntax and references.

The question is whether somebody can knock together a research paper that will stand up to academic scrutiny.

I think we just found a new Turing test.

Tom Dunne

cyberwolf77 wrote: »

I think we just found a new Turing test.

That was exactly what I was thinking of as I was typing that post.

cyberwolf77

That would be interesting to see actually. A program capable of convincing academia they were looking at a paper produced by a human being. Alternatively, how about a program that can write a novel and get a publisher to accept it.

Black Swan

Tom Dunne wrote: »

I am sure I could knock together a software program that could generate a research paper, with the proper structure, syntax and references.

The question is whether somebody can knock together a research paper that will stand up to academic scrutiny.

cyberwolf77 wrote: »

I think we just found a new Turing test.

Part of the purpose of the peer-review process in scholarly journals, as well as such "scrutiny" by informed readers should AI paperBot get past 3 reviewers and editors into print.

Black Swan

Other than formatting, which we already have with several existing APA, MLA, Chicago, Trabian, etc. edit programmes, not sure how an AIpaperBot could come up with original content, especially something meaningful to a discipline where the competition for publication in top peer-reviewed journals is substantial?

Tom Dunne

Let's be clear on this - given the current state of AI, there is absolutely not a hope in hell that any system can produce anything remotely resembling original content.

I've a few Chardonnays on me at the moment, so I can't remember the source, but I was only recently reading an article on AI that confirms the recent "triumphs" of machines over man ( Watson/Go) are entirely based on brute force computing, not any kind of machine intelligence.

bduffy

Tom Dunne wrote: »

Let's be clear on this - given the current state of AI, there is absolutely not a hope in hell that any system can produce anything remotely resembling original content.

Agreed. The fake abstract was submitted to a questionable conference so it's no surprise that some people are getting good mileage out of it: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/upshot/fake-academe-looking-much-like-the-real-thing.html

Black Swan

Just as there are fake conferences with spurious papers there are also fake universities (e.g., Trump University): Caveat emptor.

Ostrom

These are dime a dozen now, my work email is spammed to feck with this ****e every morning - fake journals too. There is a postmodernist humanities paper generator out there, but for laughs.

Black Swan

If you know your discipline, the conferences, and peer-reviewed journals that represent it, no worries.

Ostrom

Black Swan wrote: »

If you know your discipline, the conferences, and peer-reviewed journals that represent it, no worries.

The volume is substantial enough to make it problematic. Also the phrasing of the title usually results in "hmm this looks interesting.....click.....dammit". It adds up. And journal turnover is high - new ones come, old ones go, you always find work from other fields of relevence. I'm not sure it is possible to 'set' permanent boundaries on relevent reading. Which results in cumulative wasted clicks and lost hours over time.

Tree

Black Swan wrote: »

If you know your discipline, the conferences, and peer-reviewed journals that represent it, no worries.

Also, not all newbies know the good from the bad (and their bosses don't always have the time to help with that)

Black Swan

Ostrom wrote: »

I'm not sure it is possible to 'set' permanent boundaries on relevent reading. Which results in cumulative wasted clicks and lost hours over time.

Indeed there's rubbish to sort through, especially after a new discovery in your discipline; or when attempting to decontextualise and borrow a concept from another discipline and apply it to your conceptual framework. Hopefully scholarly search engines will continue to improve and reduce spurious results and save time.

Tree wrote: »

Also, not all newbies know the good from the bad (and their bosses don't always have the time to help with that)

I recognize many of the principals who publish in my field from reviewing the literature, but identifying newly published scholars can be troublesome, like panning for gold in a stream, with most things found being wasted minerals to discard. Then again there's a chance of finding Fool's Gold that may appear in fake conferences, publications, and Trump Universities that must be discarded too.

Tom Dunne

Ostrom wrote: »

The volume is substantial enough to make it problematic.

This is one of the bigger issues, discerning what is considered an authoritative source and what falls into what I describe as the "Mickey Mouse Journal".

In a previous job, I used to review job applicants for lecturing positions and we used to receive a significant number from Asian applicants. When I would see poor grammar and spelling in the application, yet publications numbering over 20 and 30, it would always raise a flag as to the quality of such journals. So when evaluating an applicant, I found myself also evaluating the "journals" they had published in.