“Loki”, in the comments;
This is a classic example of cargo cult science where, a researcher notes that the more papers a person has, the higher their standing in the local scientific hierarchy. Thus, instead of doing research which would result in a few truly profound discoveries in a handful of papers, he instead decides that the more papers he publishes the greater his standing will be. He notes that papers have a certain structure, contain graphs and figures and he spends his time generating detailed figures and graphs just like the Pacific Islanders craeated fake airports after WWII. Someone like him should never work in research again and should be tarred and feathered before being run out of his lab. In todays publish or perish research environment, Einstein would be considered a liability given his very low scientific productivity as judged by the number of papers he published.
In medicine, fraud in research if far easier to commit as complexity of meatware is far greater than what one is working with in solid state physics. Also, doctors in many cases appear incapable of being objective and the easiest way one can get threatened as a medical student is to point out glaring holes in a physicians research project. In the world of academic research (or at least when I was a researcher) such criticisms are welcome as it saves one going down the wrong path whereas in medicine such comments lead to threats about ones future. Considering that medicine considers consensus more important than scientific rigor, it’s no surprise that one has the worst scientific frauds being committed in this field.
Back in my research days, most of these papers were known as “dollar papers” – tidbits of the main research projects written specifically to keep the grant funds flowing…
Back in another life,when being an aeronautical engineer meant more than desinging fancy new paper airplanes,we often had to sit down with technologists/technicians and re-write manuals due to some re-curring snafu. 90% of the the time,it was the “lowly” tech who pointed out the obvious fix and the best and cheapest way to do it. Smarter? Maybe. Lucky? Maybe. However,the main reason was they were the ones who WORKED with the finished product and had to figure out how to get around the “theory” on the blueprints.And I can attest to many a 2 year tech putting a 12 year engineer in their place more than once(moi included). Sorta of works on the same premise as you design the car,you change the plugs and oil!
Loki is dead on right, but there’s another thing that most people miss. There is so much pressure to publish, that most professors don’t have the time to do much else, especially *review* papers to the extent they need to be reviewed. Often they do a quick read and make a few points, but can easily miss subtle errors in the review. What’s more, the more famous the author, the less time more reviewers will spend on the review.
So, next time you hear the mantra “But it was peer reviewed” keep in mind how broken the peer reviewal process is.
In less elegant words. People die because of the ego’s of a few.
Real research is harder, while lying easier.
Consensus hides the facts, while whistle blowers become the enemy.
It makes no difference if bridges collapse, or medical procedures become harmful. Its the top guys who really matter with their fake theories touted as truth .Damn any consequences.
The gods of Academia rule no matter what.
A better, if still flawed, method of evaluating the impact of a researcher’s work is to measure the number of citations of his or her papers in peer-reviewed journals. One can make this even more effective by (1) not counting citations to one’s own papers and (2) only counting one citation per paper.
This gives researchers an incentive to write papers that attract the interest of other researchers, and not to reheat the same old gruel again and again.
yah, engineers used to get upset when it was pointed out that IT was wrong, or a stupid design at best. But when you spoke to some one at the PHD level, they usually listened. Worked at one job were the head of engineering (PHD) used to get us service techs to sit and chat over a coffee, just so he could learn things, as, the techs were out there seeing “new” ideas all the time, plus we saw were our designs were weak.
I always look forward to a posting from Loki.
Thanks for highlighting my post Kate. Peer review is a time consuming process and, back in my research days, I’d sometimes take a week to work through a paper that I suspected had some mathematical flaw. OTOH, I would learn a lot from the process and it gave me an excuse to do some coding not connected to my usual work.
What will likely take the place of the current peer review process is crowdsourced dissections of papers in a similar fashion that open source software is peer reviewed. One of the problems that one has when publishing a paper on a project that may have taken years is that one has made a number of assumptions during the research and these may not be valid. External review is needed to find these flaws but fellow scientists working in the same field making the identical wrong assumptions are the last people who one would expect to find fatal flaws in the research. As has been pointed out above, usually it’s someone with little or no experience in the field who stumbles upon errors.
Wattsupwiththat is an excellent forum for such crowd sourced research and I look forward to every post by Willis Essenbach who has a quite unique perspective on many aspects of climatology as one would expect given his rather eclectic background. The discussions on WUWT are a no-holds barred attack on any hypothesis posted there and, should the hypothesis survive the attack, there’s probably something to it.
The crisis in peer review has been around for quite a while and was first described by Dr. Suter who wrote a paper Guns in the medical literature. A failure of peer review. Of course it was attacked by hoplophobic physicians but it was the first time that I began thinking about what a shaky foundation much of science stands on.
Rabbit is correct in noting that the number of times a paper gets cited is indicative of its importance. However, what I’ve found about the work that I did over 25 years ago, only in the last 10 years have I seen citations to my papers and they’ve been the most frequent in the last 5 years. I guess when you’re doing true bleeding edge science that requires $100K of computers alone to do, not many people are going to duplicate that work until Moores law lets them use their laptop to do the number crunching.