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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

"Fastest growing" is usually an annoying statistic. It's really meaningless. Say Germany produced 100,000 scientific studies last year, and this year produced 150,000 studies, they grew at 50%. If Iran produced 1,000 studies last year and this year produced 2,000, they now have a 100% growth, capturing the "fastest growing" title.

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If I'm reading graphs right, there were about 300k publications from the US in 2009 and about 10k from Iran, so, about 3% the output of the US, or about 14% adjusted per capita.

(This naturally doesn't argue your point -- I was just curious what the real numbers were.)

Measuring the amount of papers is questionable as well. One paper with a ridiculous breakthrough (cold fusion, etc) could outweigh all the others.

Having gone through graduate school, I've seen my share of nonsense papers created just to have a topic for a thesis.

Same here, one of the reasons I quit my phd program. I saw how much of the publication volume is bs--it's really hard and rare to produce a meaningful research paper, and that rarity will only increase.

If you go to a top cs conference, chances are 80% of the papers are throw-away...literally no one will read other than the reviewers, and I'm talking about top-conferences let alone the countless lesser known ones. And to be honest, a lot of emerging countries seem to be mass producing a lot of low quality papers in CS, and it's flooding the field. One reason might be how cheap it is to fund a cs research project as opposed to an experimental physics or bio lab.

same in medicine, they collect garbage from the Internet, make a 1000 page book and become specialist doctors with it.

Indeed. The more interesting fact in this paper is how China is picking up with the US in number of papers.

http://xkcd.com/605/

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