AnonTechie writes:
"In an article called Killing Pigs and Weed Maps: The Mostly Unread World of Academic Papers it is claimed that, according to one study, which was presumably read by more than three people, half of all academic papers are read by no more than three people. A burgeoning field of academic study called citation analysis (it's exactly what it sounds like) has found that this joke holds true for not just dissertations, but many academic papers. A study at the University of Indiana found that 'as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.' That same study concluded that 'some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited.' That is, nine out of 10 academic papers-which both often take years to research, compile, submit, and get published, and are a major component by which a scholar's output is measured-contribute little to the academic conversation.
This is hardly surprising given the topics that some have chosen to research and present as papers. For example:
- Complexity of Early and Middle Successional Stages in a Rocky Intertidal Surfgrass Community.
- How Good Is Your Weed Map? A Comparison of Spatial Interpolators.
- Killing a Pig."
(Score: 4, Informative) by lhsi on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:04PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:08PM
(Score: 5, Funny) by Pherenikos on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:36PM
My all time favorite paper "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of 'Writer's block' http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC131199 7/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf [nih.gov] which is probably one of the most read, yet least cited papers.
(Score: 1) by KritonK on Thursday March 20 2014, @07:31AM
5419 views in March, as of this writing.
I think that we can safely assume that the additional 2000+ views were visits from the above link. Not quite slashdotting, but we're getting there!
(Score: 1) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday March 20 2014, @08:49AM
Here's one that I highly recommend, it's a short readable and almost anecdotal paper about an example of standing waves causing terror and more: "The Ghost in the Machine" [richardwiseman.com].
Buck Feta? Duck Fice! And Guck Foogle too!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:16PM
Our academic system, whether intentionally done or not, has become optimized for rate of publication, not rate of verification. This is great in the short term, when you're excitedly looking for the next useful idea. Over the long-term, though, it begins to make honest assessment of ideas harder.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by umafuckitt on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:14PM
Yes, but it's also been optimised for producing as many students as possible. This results in lots of bad students who had no business in university in the first place. Combine pressure to publish with untalented people and you have the situation we're in today.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 19 2014, @03:51PM
This is just* elitist, unless you have data that really truly says, without ambiguity that some people have "no business in university". That sounds incredibly subjective, judgmental, and self-satisfied.
*I don't mind elitism that has objective validation, like, say, doctors knowing more about medicine than some mom does.
(Score: 3, Informative) by umafuckitt on Thursday March 20 2014, @09:47AM
Let me put it this way. Most people nowadays are going to university because they want to get a job and to get a job you need a degree. Students come at a range of academic ability levels, there's nothing "elitist" about that. To cater for the less academic we have lower-tier schools. Again, this is just how it is. I know capable people who teach part time at some of these schools and they're frustrated at the students. The students aren't motivated to learn, they don't pay attention in class, they aren't able to read the textbooks, they can't write properly, and their knowledge of the subject matter is terrible. At this point in their lives they don't need to be studying, say, cell biology. They need to be learning useful life skills that will get them a job. That is why I say they have no business being there. The other side of the coin is people going to university to study a vocation that would be better learned on the job. e.g. photography.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday March 19 2014, @03:29PM
Worse yet, it has been hijacked by publishers, such that very little of it makes it into public archives or search-ability on the web.
Its working exactly as intended: by the journals.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 1) by Hawkwind on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:05PM
Some academic review processes do look beyond the number, reputation of the journal and/or h-index of the paper come to mind. Problem is the more complex a review system the more time faculty have to spend on review. That said faculty in the University of California system seem thankful to have an extensive review system even through they sink a lot of time in to it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @10:59PM
In Jonathan Kaplan's book The Dressing Station, a medical researcher offers this advice:
"In this business, a medical advance is something which, if applied to a rat, will produce a paper. A medical breakthrough is when the rat survives."
(Score: 5, Funny) by Buck Feta on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:17PM
1. Complexity of Early and Middle Successional Stages in a Rocky Intertidal Surfgrass Community.
2. How Good Is Your Weed Map? A Comparison of Spatial Interpolators.
3. Killing a Pig."
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:21PM
Then do it. I'm sure you can find these online.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by joshuajon on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:19PM
And 2) my first point notwithstanding, even though they aren't being cited doesn't mean these papers aren't contributing to the sum of human knowledge. As long as there is little duplication then even a study on an unconventional or niche subject increases our understanding of the world in a positive fashion!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:28PM
I second this.
The articles might be of value 50 years from now.
(Score: 2) by weeds on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:15PM
What we should do is put all this into a big encyclopedia. A huge encyclopedia. A galactic encyclopedia. Now where is that Seldon guy?
Get the strategic plan going! [dev.soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Koen on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:46PM
He got lost in Borges' library [wikipedia.org].
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Daniel Dvorkin on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:28PM
Indeed. And while it's easy to make fun of papers with jargon-heavy, obscure-sounding titles, to the people in the field they can be pretty serious business. The first random-search example, "Nonresolvable Incomplete Block Designs With Few Replicates," caught my eye, because this is a really important issue in small-sample study design such as early-stage clinical trials.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [dev.soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:53PM
Best of luck to them! We'll all benefit if they're successful in weeding out the bad eggs.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by akinliat on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:00PM
The answer to your first point is that the papers are being read by the reviewers, before they're even eligible for publication (unless you're talking about open-access journals, but that's a whole 'nother issue). Most journals require peer review by no fewer than three researchers who have expertise on the topic in question. That may not seem like much, but there are practical issues finding even that many sometimes. Also, bear in mind that methodology is not specialized. Almost any decent researcher in a given discipline should be able to look at a paper and spot poor methodology.
I actually work with a researcher who does a fair bit of reviewing, and while he's probably more careful than most, there are plenty of others like him. The problems don't seem to be in the peer review process, but rather in the pressures to publish. More specifically, it's the purely quantitative measure of publications that leads to problems.
The guy I'm talking about has been in the field for about 20 years, and has published 20 or 30-odd papers. When he was up for departmental review a few years ago, they mentioned that that the minimum number of papers for promotion was fifty, and that more papers would be preferable. Not one thing was said about the quality of the publications. For that matter, there was no indication that anyone had even read them, and several of them were actually relatively important.
Academia has become yet another area where quantitative management techniques, suitable for low-skilled work, are being applied with poor result in an area where they simply make no sense at all.
As far as your second point -- well, that's why journals keep publishing papers, even if they don't get read. The truth is that you can never tell if something might be useful, even critical, later on. Something that seems trivial now may wind up being hugely important, and, frankly, the costs involved are trivial. The most expensive research tool in recent history, the Superconducting Supercollider, would have had a price tag roughly equivalent to an aircraft carrier, of which we had, IIRC, about 13 at the time. It would have been used for hundreds of experiments, and the derivative benefits were literally incalculable.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:27AM
I think very high energy particle physics overrated. In light of the LHC, I think the decision to cancel the SSC was a good one. I hope there is no bigger particle accelerator, until China and India have mostly developed, and pay a big share of its construction and development. I hope research into developing new kinds of particle accelerators continues.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday March 19 2014, @04:53PM
You've conflated being cited with being read.
When "half of all academic papers are read by no more than three people" (as well as being un-cited) it means that the papers simply aren't part of human knowledge.
Sadly, many of these are locked away behind paywalls, or simply aren't available at all, not accessible by web crawlers or search engines.
One has to allow for those papers that ARE freely available on the net, the Indiana.edu study [indiana.edu] was really only mining formal citations, not so much other links that occur on web pages, so the number of people actually reading a paper may well be vastly understated.
It is not inconceivable that huge numbers of them are simply useless, and nothing is lost. Only if they ARE on the net and CAN be searched (should the need arise) can you say they add to human knowledge.
But to the extent that the Indiana study was accurate, you still have to assume anything in these studies is simply knowledge lost to humanity.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:27PM
One interesting point not brought up is that in India (and presumably elsewhere outside the USA) its a graduation requirement to present at a conference and/or publish a paper. So everyone, and I mean everyone, publishes a paper and/or attends a conference. They aren't real journals and aren't real conferences of course. Its a money making racket for the folks who publish papers and/or put on fake conferences. But this could distort the statistics.
"Only the cream of the crop present at academic conferences" "well, we're all above average here, so we'll require everyone to present at a conference" "No problem, we'll create a bunch of meaningless conferences to present at". Same deal with papers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by umafuckitt on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:51PM
Two points. In the better Chinese universities PhD students have to publish as a first author in a journal with a good impact factor. This guards against the problem you bring up. The second point is really what you say next: that there is a lot, a heck of a lot, of shitty science being done. It's now reached the point where a whole industry has sprung up to support the shitty stuff. We have new, super shitty, journals and conferences just for publishing the crap. I'm an academic and I get spammed by this crap on a daily basis. Basically, you pay and it goes in. Without the rigour it's little better than pseudo-science.
IMO, all of this is a consequence of the fact that "everyone needs to go to college". So you have to create a cadre of crap academics to teach the crap students in the crap colleges. Nothing is being achieved in these places. At best they should be converted to trade schools teaching 1 to 2 year vocational courses. Then they'd actually be doing something useful. Right now it's just a massive waste of time and money.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 19 2014, @04:01PM
Au contraire! There are many things being achieved:
1. The labor market is slackening for people with a college degree, meaning that half of college grads are underemployed and those that aren't are less likely to rock the boat by demanding middle-class income or a 40-hour work week or chances of advancement.
2. There's a glut of would-be academics that are all stuck in adjunct positions and getting paid maybe enough to live on, all currently functioning on the dream that if they publish the right thing they might eventually get a tenure-track position.
3. Banks make a tidy profit from all those student loans, that by law cannot be discharged for any reason whatsoever.
4. The underemployment among college grads is making the plight of high school grads even worse, because now they're getting pushed out of the administrative assistant and mailroom jobs that used to be a way they could get started.
Something is being achieved, but it sure isn't benefiting the advancement of human knowledge, or anyone who is doing the real work. However, if your goal is to create a country of a very small number of "job creators" and a very large number of people willing to do the bidding of the "job creators" for whatever pittance they want to pay, then this is a very successful system. And they're particularly happy about they're doing to academia, because they know it will take decades to finally get rid of all those annoying people with good jobs and tenure.
Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by muhgi on Wednesday March 19 2014, @03:18PM
United States' schools have the same or similar requirements for many PhD programs. MD Anderson Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences requires that the PhD candidate have a first author paper submitted or published in order to receive a PhD.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Wednesday March 19 2014, @06:18PM
US schools have similar requirements for PhD dissertations.
If you spend a bit of time one CiteSeer: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index [psu.edu] ...you'll find an impressive range of papers. Some PhD papers had a huge impact on the world, and are used as the basis for technology we're using on a daily basis... But MOST are really mundane, lazy science-fair type crap, done in a week. From "We think freeze-dried milk will taste better than evaporated... NOPE it doesn't," to "Here's a quick explanation of a device/technology in our field, and we hypothesize some pointless, circular nothing... Gimme my PhD."
Do YOU see ALL home-page stories?
dev.soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=1
github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/78
(Score: 5, Interesting) by darnkitten on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:04PM
I have yet to publish anything; however, I read papers in my field as often as I can. They often contain information useful to my job. I also read papers unrelated to my field because they sound interesting (the paper on seventeenth century Scottish coins sounds like something I'd read--I wish the author had cited it) or pass them along (the weed maps paper) to others. Unfortunately, the only metric that seems to matter is whether they are cited in other papers--a bias evident in both TFA and in the supporting papers.
If only there was a way of, say, counting page views, or maybe, voting on how useful the papers are...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:25PM
> I have yet to publish anything; however, I read papers in my field as often as I can.
IMO we need to make it easier for the people out in the profession rather than academics, like practicing doctors and such, to find out about new papers in their fields. I recently read that it takes something over a decade for a new medical procedure to spread from the originators to widespread use in the USA. There are definitely benefits to taking it slow, new is not always better, etc etc but a large part of that delay is just ignorance of a procedures existence, not caution.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by tniemi on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:28PM
Stanislaw Lem suggested a subsidy program to pay writers not to write, to ensure that only the most driven, the most talented would pursue a career in writing.
Perhaps the same could be done in science?
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:48PM
In one word, tenure?
The problem is that comes with a requirement to do tons of writing before its granted.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:09PM
Publications bundled together costing arm and leg surely don't help at all. Journals that claim their purpose is to diffuse knowledge whereas all they do is bleed large academic institutions who can barely afford to subscribe dry. The amount of waste here is staggering. So is the greed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zoinky on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:27PM
While there are some papers out there that.. should not be out there, there are also some fields which are simply more focused and smaller than others. How many people are interested in reading a paper about leech reproduction in a particular river in Alaska? Not many. Does it mean the work is useless, poorly done and should not be published or funded? Not at all. The reality is that most scientists work in relative obscurity in niche field. They can name the five people in the world who are working on the same things as they do. Their papers don't receive many citations, aren't widely read and that's just fine. The superstar exceptions are just that: exceptions.
This is why the trend of counting publications (and more recently, counting citations) to evaluate performance is really, really scary. It will lead to scientists working on whatever's hot at the time, churning out a few papers and benefiting from the citation circle-jerk... all while the less sexy topics are neglected, to the detriment of us all.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by moondrake on Wednesday March 19 2014, @03:46PM
TFA, and the summary are trolling.
First of all the study that claims 90% of the papers is uncited is not really a research article. It is just some perspectives story in physics world, and the claim is fully unsubstantiated (no direct source is given). Now, there may be some truth to that number, but I wonder what was included as "papers" (i.e. also conference abstracts, posters, lectures, etc), or that only ISI indexed journals where used.
Than the author, for inexplicable reasons combined two random words and searched if there was something written on that topic. Somehow concluding that if something came up, it must be bad. Then according to google scholar:
Turner (1983) Complexity of early and middle successional stages in a rocky intertidal surfgrass community: Cited by 42.
Dille et al. (2009) How good is your weed map? A comparison of spatial interpolators.wssajournals.org: Cited by 27
McGrath (2013) Killing a Pig. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture: No cites yet, but a 2013 article, so there is still time.
So we must according to TFA conclude these are bad because the author has no fraking clue about these respective fields, and is too stupid to read and understand the papers? The number of citations of the first two papers is quite respectable for the journal and the size of their respective research communities. I am sure the author would think " On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" is a fairly useless study as well.
Although some of this may be fundamental research (which is important anyway, even if it is NO application whatsoever), I could make a first guess why this type of work is important (did not even read the papers, just having an open mind):
1) erosion of coastal areas is a big problem in some places. Understanding better what plants grow there and help prevent erosion is useful
2) If you are working in agriculture, and you want to go crops, you do not want to many weeds. Anything that helps you to achieve this is useful
3) Do you visit restaurants?
(Score: 3, Informative) by hubie on Wednesday March 19 2014, @04:28PM
I agree fully. The article (blog?) took and ran with the first few sentences from an article that is about the evolution and impact of citation analysis. TFA is basically "look at all the useless stuff that people research. We should only research worthwhile things." I also don't know how you can tell how many articles get read from citation analysis, unless citation analysis also includes the number of times it is accessed online.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NoMaster on Wednesday March 19 2014, @06:20PM
You jest - but as an ecologist, that sounds interesting and useful.
On the other hand, "Unsupervised Learning by Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis" sounds like complete wank.