You may recall the story about high-school students who were paying to get medical papers published in order to get into college. That’s the sort of level we’re at now. It’s just pervasive. People are looking only at metrics, not at actual papers. We’re so fixated on metrics because they determine funding for a university based on where it is in the rankings. So it comes from there and then it filters down. What do universities then want? Well, they want to attract people who are likely to publish papers. So how do you decide that? “Oh, you’ve already published some papers, great. We’re gonna bring you in.” And then when you’re there, you’ve got to publish even more.
You’re replacing actual findings and science and methodology and the process with what I would argue are incredibly misleading — even false — metrics. Paper mills are industrializing it. This is like the horse versus the steam engine.
https://archive.ph/rYMxq <- for people who don’t want to pay nymag money
This is like the opposite of sudden, this was a slow but continous creep for decades
Yup. And we are finding the frauds (faster?)
sometimes written by artificial intelligence
This kind of thing sucks for people who work really hard to get some interesting results to publish
it’s because we’re training so many Ph.D.’s and convincing them all that the only way to remain a scientist is to stay in academia. It’s not, and that hasn’t been true for a long time.
What’s the alternative? Go work for the military? A corporation?
If I was a scientist I’d sure as fuck want to work in academia.
is nymag the same as nypost?
No they’re better. They have some pro-labor people there.
No… tis more the NYT style…
If you were to isolate one factor, citations matter the most … somewhere between like 30 percent and 60 percent of those rankings are based on citations. Citations are so easy to game. So people are setting up citation cartels: “Yes, we will get all of our other clients to cite you, and nobody will notice because we’re doing it in this algorithmic, mixed-up way.”
Hell yeah, scientific MLMs that are stuffed full of sock-puppets.
For $5,000 you can get either a bunch of followers, or in-game gold, or academic paper citations.
