Third editor fired in Elsevier’s citation cartel crackdown
chrisbrunet.com
chrisbrunet.com
Maybe universities, tenure committees, and funding sources should stop measuring academics by vanity metrics such as H-Index and publication counts. And don't get me started on the tendency toward "minimum publishable units."
That said, abusing power as an editor deserves a special place in hell...
It’s not even about philosophical disagreement as much as future career
I imagine most academics would gladly not participate in this game if their entire livelihood didn’t depend on it
The difficulty is that nobody knows how to. My guess is that if you want good signaling, you'll need to find something that is difficult to fake. My guess are evolving benchmarks that measure many things in multiple dimensions, but benchmarks were easily gamed.
The only advantage the current system has is that it is stupendously simple, so at least it is hard to manipulate.
It probably wouldn't have risen to this level. People always notice but don't always react in ways you can measure.
https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/24/elsevier-choses-pape...
This type of corporation is nasty and should not be allowed to exist, but thanks to people like the Maxwell clan, they do. For now.
This will continue until Elsevier and their 3 or 4 peers are removed from the academic publishing process entirely.
However, I am a bit uncomfortable with the pithy language used. It's possible (likely, even), that the fired editors deserve the pithiness, but it's still a bit weird to read that kind of prose, in a scientific context.
Professional news is usually written without expressing judgement and minimizing opinion.
> fraudsters
It's an allegation.
The author only hurts themself: My impression is that they don't believet the fundamentals of truth and humanity: they are certainly partially wrong, could be very wrong, will never know the complete truth, and their judgment of others is too flawed to rely on. Also it seems they are acting more on their emotions and less on fact and reason.
Literally zero need for that; none. And it's that kind of language that calls into question the authors motives. I went from "Excellent reporting here" to "This guy is emotional and not a reliable source of information" in 6 words.
I certainly apologize for hurting feelings. That was not my intent.
I've just learned (the hard way, of course, because how else do we learn?), that using this kind of terminology, even though we may be feeling quite pithy, gives ammo to those that wish to discount us.
This goes double, in my experience, for any context that prizes objectivity and articulate discussion.
Then again, I also found it rather funny. I suspect this is because I am a bad person.
Doing them both together increases the amplitude of the signal at the cost of reducing the integrity of the signal.
If you wonder why the world is informationally too loud and too noisy these days, it's because everyone who does this is turning up the volume to be louder than others who are also, in turn, turning up the volume for the same reasons.
I’ve been using “pithy” as a a rhetorical hook for decades. It’s fairly common.
I must however, take the time to be the ever-sensitive snowflake and highlight a troubling trend in this person's other posts. He seems to have some anti-trans leanings[1], refusing to gender people correctly and all that (and certainly not pushing back against comments which declare "M to Fs are psychotic bullies who would kill all of us to maintain their sacred illusion". Not to imply that one must rebuke every unkind thing in their comment section, but I hope you can understand that it is illustrative of his audience.). Now I'm no proponent of death threats or double standards, it's just a convenient way to highlight a lack of respect. He will misgender you if he does not like you, and he does not like any delusional transwomen[2].
He's also quite concerned about Canada's population. The capital-W White population specifically [3]. Note that this is presented separate from later graphs about TFWs, so I don't even think he has the right to hide behind that paper-tissue-thin shield. He is quite sad to see the Great White North get a little less white. I am not saying that Canada has managed its immigration well, but I do not believe that he is overly concerned with those matters.
I'm not here to litigate his arguments, I have other things to do with my life. He has his principles, and I have mine. I'm certain he'd be happy to talk for hours about the transwomen and the Indians and all the topics polite society cowers from. His anti-Zionism and dislike of the Rothchilds, I am certain, comes from a strongly-voiced anti-Imperalist lense.
[1] https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-univ...
[2] https://substack.com/@chrisbrunet/note/c-244102564
[3] https://www.chrisbrunet.com/i/175390557/6-white-population
For the future, though, usually if you just email one of the paper author's with even a hint of interest you'll get the full paper and often a neat discussion about how your specific interest relates to the paper. I think people assume researchers get hounded by fans like celebrities but they're usually folks that love to talk about their topics of interest.
I didn't see anything "troubling" (let alone "extremely troubling") or anything that would indicate that anyone other than the implicated authors have an integrity issue.
I didn't immediately see a red flag that would make me discount all of their work. It's clear what the author's general opinions are. They're entitled to them of course.