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Comment by irq11 | Hacker News Reader

“it's also true that publish or perish is creating ever-growing mountains of worthless papers.”

Is this true? Prove your claim.

”This is a real problem, and drags the quality of everything down.“

Let’s assume your first assertion is true. Is it automatically true that your second claim follows? Why?

I see no evidence that the individual productivity of scientists has changed much in the last 30 years, nor do I notice much of a change in the aggregate quality of science. Crappy science existed hundreds of years ago, and it continues to exist today. The main difference, as far as I can tell, is that we have a lot more scientists now.

In any case, these are just assertions, not arguments.

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You would think crappy science would go down with progress? I think not.

You should look for papers in psychology/sociology, AI (recommendation engines, accuracy), economics, nutrition and medicine. Marketing papers are also interesting, I guess.

As an anecdote, I dug into sexuality, gender papers recently and was baffled at the amount of shit I came across. I couldn't believe someone published it.

> Crappy science existed hundreds of years ago, and it continues to exist today. The main difference, as far as I can tell, is that we have a lot more scientists now

And ability to influence a lot more people faster than ever before with increasing level of distrust. Not to mention, papers from US and EU affects other nations perhaps more. Many people blindly piggyback due to not enough funding to replicate or perform our own analysis. Funding being scarce promotes hype and flock people towards whatever media popularizes.

It results in a very weird disconnection on topics that are dependent on population, history, culture, and other location sensitive data. The base is contaminated, anything built on it is not going to suddenly turn into truth.

There have always been weaker scientists, but there hasn't always been the economic incentive to publish in order to maintain a teaching position. This is a relatively recent (few decades) thing and is due to structural factors in academia and society. If you require proof, I'm not really sure what to say to you, as evidence is not hard to find, but if you don't already see it, I'm unlikely to change your mind.

If you want to claim that “publish or perish” (which, btw, has been a part of academic life essentially forever) is somehow recently affecting the volume of papers being produced, you should be able to provide evidence of that in a straightforward manner. One obvious test: is the per-capita rate of publication increasing? (my experience says “no”, but I’m open to contrary evidence.)

You have a hypothesis of what’s going on, but you’ve provided no evidence for that hypothesis, and when challenged to provide some, you tell other people it’s their job to do it for you.

It’s not my job to prove your extraordinary claims.

The number of publications per year per academic seems to me to have increased over the last 50 years. I don't have a citation.

Regardless, my original claim was that the absolute number of papers is growing, and most of them are trash. I think the sheer volume of trash has consequences that were not so serious 100 years ago, even if the percentage of trash was the same. I strongly suspect the percentage of trash has been going up, as well.

My argument is that "publish or perish" makes less and less sense the more active scientists and researchers there are, even if the average quality and the rate of publication per academic were constant, because the appetite and rate at which research can be assimilated by society is limited, and does not scale with population, while the number of scientists does.

I don't think these claims are extraordinary, and if you do, I'm not going to go looking for extraordinary evidence to try to convince you. I don't think I'm the only that sees these effects, however.

”The number of publications per year per academic seems to me to have increased over the last 50 years. I don't have a citation.”

Yeah, that’s not evidence.

The absolute number of papers is growing - along with the number of working scientists. There’s been huge growth in academic science since the 1970s.

> One obvious test: is the per-capita rate of publication increasing?

It definitely is, in biology at least. My graduate mentor was really interested in publication metrics (as in, he published studies on them). The main driver is not necessarily crappy journals though, it is the increasing number of authors per paper.

I have no idea how you would evaluate something like "the average quality of papers is decreasing". I actually agree with GP that it is, but that's just, like, my opinion, man.

Author lists may (again: evidence required) be growing, but that’s not at all the same thing as per-capita publication rate, and doesn’t support the GP claim.

A priori, long author lists indicate collaboration, which is generally a good thing.

The number of citations/references has ballooned as well. So, if papers stand on more shoulders , most of which are crappy shoulders, they ll make crappy science

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