I respect that opinion but what is the alternative? actually Data researches can save the day. what data is in these papers. Great news for those asking that question. there is a feild of study called Data journalism. it seems we need more. they can write papers on how much of this data is fake/useless.
@@williamoverton7775 " there is a field of study called Data journalism. it seems we need more. they can write fake papers on how much of this data is fake/useless."
My first disillusionment with grad school was when my advisor pushed for me to write up my "results" for submission, and told me a list of papers that I needed to cite in the introduction. At the time, I had no results; I was still trying to figure out what I was doing. The list of papers was a bunch of her papers that all said basically the same thing and which all cited each other. And none of them seemed relevant to what I was working on. I did not work for that advisor for very long.
I had academia steal work I put in public domain. it was nanotechnology that used graphene and hematene for a water powered battery. this was UNSW and there is now a spin off company with "their" "discovery"
This is why we trust the respected journals in our respective fields (nature, cell, science, New England journal of medicine for me). It’s not hard to ignore bad journals/paper mills
@@ThatOpalGuy How is state-funded research capitalism? If anything, it's socialism-like because tax dollars are taken by force an redistributed to the well-connected.
@@doggo6517 For these reductivist simpletons, "Corruption" = "Capitalism". They will destroy any nuance, system, or construction in the name of their "X = Y" crusade of reductivist idiocy. By even mentioning state-funded research, you've overloaded their circuits; this does not compute with their black and white world view of EVERYTHING !
On the other hand I fail to see what is an actual alternative? If we don't have metrics, I think the only reasonable alternative is having a neutral reviewer from outside the field? Or everyone acting as a reviewer for others. And that has it's own set of problems. Do we have to privatize all research and let the free markets come up with something? Because I can already tell, that markets won't magically come up with anything new, the entrepreneurs are only human after all, they will come with the same stupid metrics and nothing will change in the end.
@@JanVerny Privatization of research is a good way to kill civilization because only short sighted, short term cash grabs will be funded. 99% of all huge scientific and economic breakthroughs in the last 500 years were funded by public money, without it we would still be in feudalism with token steam engines appearing in mines and lumber mills...
@@JanVerny The problem is different for each field in academia but at the end of the day everything falls into one single umbrella. For example, in mathematics the most important thing is that the results presented are correct and the second important thing is that they are relevant to some other research in some way. This is a rather low bar but it tends to work fine. If we are talking about physics we obviously want results to actually be useful in explaining something so we need a higher bar.
One of my papers on spiking neurons got cited by a homeopathy paper - which contains over 400 citations most of which have nothing to do with homeopathy. It's ridiculous.
I've gotten several emails straight up offering me money to either add certain authors to my papers, or cite specific papers in my own publications. Hiring and awarding grants based on H-index has to end if academia is to survive.
I worked in commercial research all my career. In theory there was a great reality check, whether your innovations worked and made money. But in practice, patents were often the "currency" for commercial scientists instead of published papers. And there are an awful lot of nonsense patents.
@@JamilaJibril-e8h If you want papers to be credible then each one of then needs to reproduced a year or more after being published similar to a patent pending. If something is not reproduceable in not science.
@@southcoastinventors6583 oh is that a threat or stealing excuses if it's copyright by school or institution or creative individual it wont work if it's produced or not
Back in the 90s when I was looking for a job, I wrote a joke CV for a bull terrier. I included letters of recommendation and a parody publication list. I'd send the dog's info first and follow it with my resume and an apology letter saying the dog had gotten on my computer unbeknown to me. I didn't get any interviews.
I’ve published two papers in scientific journals. I once did a reverse reference lookup to see if anyone cited my papers in their own articles. I found that two authors referenced my work but upon reading their work discovered that they BOTH misunderstood the conclusions of my paper! They both misunderstood my article and thus used my citation incorrectly. I pretty much lost confidence in peer-reviewed studies after that.
@@user255 one of our former post-docs could not get a paper through peer review because one the reviewers wanted him to cite his own work. We ended up having to add discussion to the paper in order to cite his work. Reporting to the journal does nothing but get you triaged before review even occurs
@@joshua43214 Hard to believe, which journal? I would report that and the case of the OP anonymously. Journal without reputation is not much worth of anything.
The classic case is to publish a paper with some gross error in it. The result is lots of people publish papers citing you for your terrible mistake. Viola lots of citations.
This is how you get answers on tech forums. Post a question and it gets ignored. Post a question with one account, then give an incorrect answer with another. People jump out of the woodwork to correct the wrong answer. It must be someone's Law, by now.
It's clear that maximizing the number of papers published and the number of citations is not a good incentive structure for advancing scientific knowledge. In fact it may be doing more harm than good at this point. I wonder what a better incentive structure would look like.
I'd propose an hierarchy of reviewers. There would be sort of a long-lasting grand jury at the top of it, maintained the same way as the boards that accredit colleges and physicians?
Unfortunately we cannot measure quality, only quantity, and accountants, personnel departments (etc.) can only judge quantity. Citations were intended to measure quality, but as several other comments have observed, Goodhart's law cuts in, and they end up being corrupted by scams such as these.
@ b43xoit a "jury-pyramid" only grants a few power to make or break a career.. hoping for 'reluctant philosophers' to be the only ones showing up for those positions is.. well, "not realistic" to put it friendly.
the incentive structure of the whole of society is broken from the ground up as our currency has got a technical flaw (since ancient times) that creates a monopol that is only "happy" if the economy grows exponentially.. reality can't, thus all those symptoms (of which this is just one) appear.
Alas, my cat is irredeemably lazy and has yet to produce so much as a post-it note - much less any significant body of influential intellectual analyses.
When the referees' comments come in with a helpful list of papers you might cite. All by the same person. When you must cite all of your supervisor's papers. When the environmental group helping you asks you to "just add a sentence or two about what this implies for managing the environment". This has been visible for over a decade.
The main problem is the wide spread of formal quantitative measures (that can be manipulated) for scientists' evaluations, be it on the grant stage, hiring stage, or promotion stage. No surprise that such measures become the target. Basically, we asked it to be the target.
There is a similar thing happening in medicine. If someone comes in with a stubbed toe you can earn a lot more money by doing a complete history and physical, an X-ray, a CT scan, a MRI and extensive blood testing. Then you tell the patient they have a stubbed toe and send them home with instructions to ice and elevate.
The same thing happens with cars. Take the car in for an oil change and leave with new tires, brakes, muffler, windshield wiper blades. They do the 27-point inspection so they can sell you the store.
Couldn’t academia adopt something like view count, like/dislike buttons, 0-5 star reviews, and comments for these digital papers so that citations alone wouldn’t be the only proxies for “did anyone actually read this” and “did they all pan it as total BS or not?”. Basically, a mix of YT or Rumble and Amazon interfaces for giving feedback on something & having all other users see it. You could even limit write access to members of universities and similar institutions, break down the results by (say) tenured professors in the field vs. grad vs. undergrad students, etc. Possibly even do what stack overflow does and clearly indicate that “This 3-star, mixed negative review is the expert consensus” & outright remove papers that get flagged as spam or total garbage. After awhile such an interactive arXiv would become the default repo and review arena for entire fields, as the original did for fundamental physics, and the fraudsters would have to seriously up their game to keep up. To me it would restore some sanity by enabling a de facto form of totally decentralized peer review in the same manner the origin arXiv transformed publication. Who actually read, reviewed, etc. a publication would be a matter of public record. If basically nobody reads it then a giant citation count is a much more obvious red flag. Citation count alone would cease to be the only metric or even the metric most people join that space used, making it easier to finally push the administration and bureaucrat types to use something a bit more complex & nuanced.
Only in places where medicine is for-profit. In the UK, if I go to my doctor with a stubbed toe there's no financial incentive for them to do anything but ice-and-levitate.
This is why an old fashioned library, a building, stacks, librarian, and the works were so important. Online makes it easy to scheme. Paper libraries had to pay for the paper copies. This cost money, and so only reputable journals were available. Go up into the stacks and the books that look shiny and new are the ones to avoid. Pay attention to the books whose covers are worn, that is, well loved. Can't do that with digital papers and books.
That's not really true. Non-reputable journals were cheaper that reputable journals. So from a purely monetary point of view, there was an incentive to put non-reputable journals in the library. And I'm not just speaking theoretically; I remember finding a shelve with a journal where even a short look into it told me that this is esoteric, not science. And yes, it was the physics section of the library.
@__christopher__ What is not really true? There were and always have been esoteric journals. In a print library, someone had to request them and secure funding. Ther equestor thought them worth while.
"Academic success starts and ends wirth your personal connections" That is not necessarily linked to the discussed problem. I would even argue that this statement is the most accurate explanation of what a PhD is good for. Ive tried to keep track of all the publications in all well-known journals that cover my research topic, but it's simply impossible to do so. There is no other way to rely on personal connections. My very first scientific publication reached the 50 citations mark today. Most of the citing authors are unkown to me, but if you follow their connections you realize that they are all from the same bubble.
my most cited academic paper was cited from people ranging from astrophysicists to apple reaping agricultural researchers. but i think that is rather not too common. the rest is like you say, a paper a bubble.
Have you ever encountered what could be described as a mutual citation society where a cluster of academics in some sub-niche continuously cite each other?
I notice that Doug Zonker's "Chicken" paper was shown. I had the great pleasure and honor of seeing the live presentation in 12-minute conference format. Two "questions" were planted in the audience, and that was equally hilarious.
Here is the current academic culture: peer review has been irreparably broken, scammers are everywhere, including most esteemed members of the research community, and those research grants would be awarded to one of the most successful scammers. It's literally a modern dark age.
The basic problem is the obsession with metrics. “You’re a 10, I’m an 11 and therefore worth more than you” and so on. It has totally poisoned scientific endeavour, particularly academic research, where it has just become a continuous pointless churn. It is largely down to politicians and public funding bodies who obsess with simple values to rank everything and then wonder why so much effort is then put into gaming them.
What other metric are public funding bodies supposed to rely on when theirs funds are limited and they need to figure out who to give it to? A more interesting question would also be why public funding is under such a pressure in the first place.. which leads us to a technical flaw in currency that exists for at least 2500 years.
@@joansparky4439 Make it the true lottery it already is. Random choice cannot be worse. And it would not need any resources. Now public funding bodies need thousands of reviewers each time they want to give away their grants, stealing life and research time from all of them, possibly inflicting more damage just by this, than gaining anything by the process itself.
You are absolutely right. The rot started maybe 30 years ago when commercial publishers started buying up the small and rigorous academic journals produced by learned societies. Once it became a business, it became a game and we call got conned into playing it....
The particle physicists citing each other reminds me of how politicians in the US often write bills with funding sources that don't actually exist. There's a passage from a book called "The Deficit Myth" where one politician is overheard saying to another "I voted for your bill even though your pay-for is BS"
@@eingyi2500 Most likely a mix of three things: Blatant corruption with some surreptitious connection to the politician's personal affairs; Incompetent politicians who don't understand how legislation should be properly written; or laziness on the assumption that the money will come from somewhere but that will be someone else's problem.
Socrates asked too many questions, taught others in this tech and thus was a problem for the beneficiaries of the status quo - who were personally incentivized to hold onto it and thus got a simple majority organized to solve this problem.. which in turn caused Plato to write 'The Republic' in which he blamed 'the mob' for all of it.. Yay?!
When I joined academia in the 1990s as a professor the honor system for refereeing was still fashionable. By the time I retired in the 2010s (early but post tenure) it had all changed to things like h-index, impact factor, double-blind refereeing, publication "processing" charges often exceeding a thousand dollars per paper) in the open access case and so on. I think that there are things that money and social prestige can't buy, and they include scientific integrity and love for understanding nature and truth.
@@tortenschachtel9498 I mean I trust cats more then anyone ignorantly screaming to trust the science. The only thing you can trust science to do is change theory based on new information and to use worse ideas to thy and fix the problems made by previous bad ideas. Outside of that once in a great while some breakthrough happens that would be great for humanity, and then someone decides to turn it into a weapon. So I can definitely understand how meow is a superior stance.
Unfortunately science is still the most reliable way to know truths. EDIT: I must reply here, because otherwise RUclips deletes my reply. Yeah... somehow it is the science that put you into the Internet, gave you air-planes, GPS, antibiotics, gene editing, cellphones, etc, etc. Not the bible or any other "holy book" or any of the thousands of alleged gods. When I was child I was in big troubles and I prayed god, no one answered. I tried other gods, no one answered. Then much later I was so convinced that none of that is real I mocked gods and prayed all the satans etc. Again no one answered. Honestly I cannot take praying seriously anymore. But I have read the Bible, and it is full of things that are factually wrong and/or morally wrong. It is clearly written by man of the time.
I’m a bit confused by this. Many researchers I know, including myself, have ResearchGate accounts. Apparently, so does Sabine. I’ve never uploaded any papers but do get frequent requests asking me to send some other researcher a copy. The copyright for some of my papers is held by the journal, but some are held by me (depends on the journal’s policy). I don’t send anything unless I am the copyright holder. It seems to me that the problem lies elsewhere, but I certainly agree that there is a problem.
You're not going to like finding out where a lot of the news pushed to headlines comes from, then. "People familiar with their way of thinking" rumors cited, then cross-cited between news outlets as facts, each citing the others as support, in a self-licking ice cream cone. I trust the cat more.
Sabine, I always appreciate your content as a reminder to take my job as a researcher less serious. Ironically, I do better work when I ignore the administrative economy of metrics. Cheers!
Here's a classic example of Judith Butler: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
I am totally familiar with this, but most of my citations are from the georgia state patrol. They are pretty bogus and have not helped my standing at all.
Finding papers has always been a huge issue, Sabine... Sometimes you hear about it, see a citation, but just can't find it. I hope some day someone creates a solution... Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
There's also a problem with them being scattered through too many different journals, many of which I hadn't heard of. I keep a list of the journals I've found useful papers in, and it currently stands at 462, having found a new one (founded in 1948, I think) last week.
Reminds me of the early days of new (lazy) kinds of degrees, such as "Bachelor of Leisure Sciences". What contribution to science are those people really providing?
Crime invades the last open spaces in society? The very last one is of course farmaceuticals, or building rockets based on a cat's antigravity paper how to vertically land.
My friends are highly cited and have a great h score but still have trouble getting an academic positions, the video you should make is how university are hiring majority adjunct not salaried professors
We have learned through experience that religious authorities are not necessarily paragons of moral behavior. IT should not come as a surprise that academics are not immune to the lure of personal gratification either. What to do about it is the real question.
this is everywhere and based on how life itself works actually.. too bad our societies are based on the assumption that we do not behave that way and most people (esp on the L side of the poli spectrum) have a real problem accepting this reality.
Both as a fan of yours, and as someone who does not agree with you all the time, I want to pose a simple question in the interest of earnest discussion: What's the fix here? The argument I'm getting is that "people should be more ethical" and that isn't really saying anything at the end of the day. How should we prioritize research? This to me all seems to be an unavoidable consequence of treating the marketplace of ideas as a LITERAL marketplace of ideas. This video gives me the impression that any for-profit motive in academic publication will lead us to Schrodinger's cats, at least the ones that write about Quantum Loop Gravity.
the problem is that any quantitative measure will become a target later on. in the future, maybe real science will be made by reputable people writing letters to other reputable people again...
Generations ago computer engineering developed the idea of web of trust, a technical solution where people could digitally vouch for each other, where you would be able to validate somebody many hops away from you based on relationships back to you. These days it seems like such a shame that WoT implementations never caught on. From social media to academic publishing it seems like it would offer such value. So I bring it up whenever I can. This is a solution that's out there, but unfortunately it's kind of stuck in a niche corner.
I believe one issue is that if the relationships are publicly visible then the system could be used to map everyone's social life and if the relationships were not publicly visible people could easily get coerced into marking someone as trustworthy.
@@MetalheadAndNerd oh one of the big features is that you can have a system where you can confirm if a and b are connected without having a list of connections for either a or b. That's part of the stuff that has been on the table for quite a long time. But in this case I'm talking about the side of the system where people are happy to be connected with each other, happy to publicly certify each other as legit. It's the kind of situation where you can map it all you want and the participants would be happy to show up in the map.
the " just not knowing about a possibly great scientific paper " reminds me of an article probably 20 years ago about a scientist who had spent 30 years figuring out a problem, only for someone on the other side of the world that happened to be working on it too ; just become famous world wide before the other guy could finish his own work. that has been my idea since then of what a scientists life is basically like.
Gödel would suggest that an ungameable system is impossible, and the tendency of people to game any system causes regulation to trend toward more rules and greater complexity, generally tending toward unwieldy beaurocracy. The only solution would seem to be an education system which teaches ethics. People need to internalize the principle that antisocial behavior is harmful, even when it isn't illegal.
at our academy, when reporting citations they have to come from Web of Science and listed with full tiles and names of journals etc, so I don't know who cares about google scholar citations?
One way to solve this is to have a platform for video publications - a munscriipt is presented, reviewed, debated and these are published as a recording rather than paper publications.
Also, your institution (at least your chair person or promotion committee) will discover that your citations are a scam and good luck getting promoted or even keeping your job.
I decided to make my career withn the engineering community as there is more opportunity for $$$$ there. I, and many many others, have done actual research that produces patentable concepts that actually result in productive work. Yet patents are considered as taboo and soiled because someone may have made money in the process. IMHO this is less questionable than many papers in the academic world as patents are generally expensive to obtain and maintain. Companies find little profit in obtaining patents unless they have a team of lawyers ready to sue patent violaters. Nonsense patents are rare as they are expensive. It is sad that pure academia seems as tainted (or more so) than the world of patents.
There are plenty of crap patents floating around. There are also plenty of scammy patent trolls who buy patents and then sue for profit or to stifle completion. Patent abuse abounds.
SOUND QUALTY: Sabine, I have been avidly watching your channel for several years, thank you. It’s very informative and very well presented. I have noticed though more recently that the vocal presentation is losing its clarity. Yes of course I’m getting older and I realise that my hearing is not what it used to be but if I do an A-B comparison with other channels where I can hear quite clearly, and then revert to your channel there is a definite lack of clarity in the sound on TV speakers. Slightly muffled is how I would describe it. I should declare that I do work within the Hi-Fi audio industry, and I am very accustomed to listening to sound systems of both professional and home setups. In the recording industry engineers who are experts in audio mastering are employed to shape the frequency response and dynamics of the broadcast sound to make it compatible with the likely devices or media it’s being listened to on. ie TV, tablets, headphones et.c. I’m not suggesting that you employ one of these mastering engineers on a permanent due to the high cost but I’m sure your recording engineer would be able to shape the sound to make it a bit more intelligible especially on TV speakers (which inherently are poor quality anyway which is a problem of course). Anyway keep up the excellent work. Thanks SP Australia
Further to this, I just noticed the mic placement on your latest video (10/9/24 ‘magical equation unites) and it is quite close to your mouth. As a former stage vocalist I was taught that close-mic technique would accentuate the lower frequency end giving a warmer more lush sound compared with moving the mic away which thins out the sound, reduces bass boominess but in doing so enhances clarity of the higher frequencies (read ‘cleaner/clearer sound”. Often it is the bass boominess that can render a voice unclear as the bass notes wash out the higher frequencies. Anyway, just an observation.
It seems that any research paper that uses the phrases "It is well known that..." or "It has long been shown that..." without footnotes should be regarded with suspicion.
It starts with g, we don't say Jalileo instead of Galileo.... Common people says otherwise, well it's not the first time that common people are not right
Anyone know how English ended up having the same letter represent two different sounds that aren't even made with the same regions of the mouth? Is it related to Arabic's gimmel vs jimmel? (And how did Arabic ever lump the two together?)
It's incredible that Sabine can make a video like this, which clearly shows the PROFIT MOTIVE as the source of these problems, but never make that connection, and indeed make another video titled "Capitalism is Good 👍"
The idea that enshittification could actually apply to science itself is kind of frightening, but all too obvious in retrospect. Since the enshittification concept applies to almost every other aspect of our lives these days and especially to all technological matters, I guess no one should be surprised by this turn of events. Worried, yes, very much. But not surprised.
The main problem in social sciences is, as Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose demonstrated, "real" and "gibberish" papers are now indistinguishable. The problem is with the domain not being a verifiable science.
it is verifiable.. one just has to start of where biology ends. Social science doesn't do that unfortunately, but rather makes up it's basics, which then leads to wrong theses.
The problem is not that the domain of study is not scientific, "merely" that the bar for publication is far too low. Insistence on rigorous statistical and experimental methodology would eliminate 99% of bad work in the fields, and little of the good. But that of course is why it's not done: it would also eliminate 90% of the researchers in these fields. Good work in the social sciences is certainly verifiable. The problem is corruption, not the area of study.
I see the paper that claims the interplay between non-local magic and entanglement in quantum manybody systems, 'Gravitational back-reaction is magical', only has 2 citations. Gravitational backreaction refers to the effect that matter and energy have on the curvature of spacetime, which in turn affects the motion and behavior of that matter and energy. Claiming it's magical rather defeats the purpose. Of course they've already dualed it, like the Higgs, and use the Maldacena conjecture. Nice, if you can get away with it. The conjecture posits that a theory of quantum gravity in an AdS space is equivalent to a CFT on the boundary of that space. This allows physicists to study strongly interacting quantum field theories using the more mathematically tractable weakly interacting gravitational theories.
Then we have LLMs reading papers written by LLMs so no human have to do anything. Yes there are papers where the "authors" haven't even bothered to check what the LLMs have written.
You are building the discriminator to a Genrator-Discriminator model. naively you can just use the output of the discriminator the loss function of a generator llm and boom - the better your discriminator gets the better the generator llm gets at making up fake papers
@@lubricustheslippery5028 This is a bit like complaining about society having both burglars and museum guards. Like one side is clearly in the wrong here and you need the other to clean up after their mess. We need AI vetting *because* there is AI fraud, you can't combat this shit with just human reviewers
Thank you for not using the doorbell sound in this video (and for your content)! I have a Wyze doorbell and every time your videos play that sound, my dog races to the window or front door barking. Although it might also be quite comical to see a video have a trigger warning for dogs... because that's the kind of society this has become.
So that's what Larry the Cat has been doing in his well-earned retirement. Didn't really see him as the kind of cat that would spend his retirement curled up in front of a fireplace all day.
The endpoint of this chain of junk journals will be the formalization of list of high-quality ((non-junk) journals. Groups that want to vet citation rankings will use such a list to sort out junk journals. This would be a relatively trivial, technological feat that will at least temporarily weaken the impact of these journals.
This is going to be hugely detrimental to my cat's academic goals
I feel your pain. Maybe advise a career change .
I don’t know… I’ve read some of your cat’s work, and he shows real promise.
@@fastradioburst253And the brilliant defense of his dissertation will surely cinch his PhD from Puurdue U.
@@fastradioburst253 I'll admit her theory on the relativity of feeding time was somewhat convincing
My cat dropped out, got addicted to catnip and is now doing time in the doghouse.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. - Goodhart's "law"
Gibberish is pronounced with hard G. - Gibberish ★Law★
@@NJ-wb1cz so is GIF
@@NJ-wb1cz Gibberish is pronounced Jibberish in the real world...
@@NJ-wb1cz Jibber-jabber on, jabroni.
@@manoo422 Alas, when a German sees the word Jibberish, they instinctively pronounce it "Yibberish."
"Publish or Perish" leads to nothing but trashing up the literature of a field with mountains of meaningless nonsense
It's the literature
I respect that opinion but what is the alternative? actually Data researches can save the day. what data is in these papers. Great news for those asking that question. there is a feild of study called Data journalism. it seems we need more. they can write papers on how much of this data is fake/useless.
@@williamoverton7775 " there is a field of study called Data journalism. it seems we need more. they can write fake papers on how much of this data is fake/useless."
@@williamoverton7775 Honesty.
Another example of the failure of capitalism.
Makes us produce goods and works, not ones that are important nor wanted, but what makes the most money.
Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
...and yet its the basis of the whole climate change band wagon...
why'd you have to ruin goodharts law
Like being ignorant of factual data and using 'peer reviews' instead? Science died in 2016 in that case.
Yea, but in the meantime it's yet another money laundering scheme.
@@antiMatterDynamit It's literally a quote from Goodhart himself. So take it up with him I guess.
My first disillusionment with grad school was when my advisor pushed for me to write up my "results" for submission, and told me a list of papers that I needed to cite in the introduction. At the time, I had no results; I was still trying to figure out what I was doing. The list of papers was a bunch of her papers that all said basically the same thing and which all cited each other. And none of them seemed relevant to what I was working on. I did not work for that advisor for very long.
Which university?
@@1chumley1most of them I’d imagine
Your citation here is elegant! You've clearly shown an example of fake academia. This is a perfect proof!
I had academia steal work I put in public domain. it was nanotechnology that used graphene and hematene for a water powered battery. this was UNSW and there is now a spin off company with "their" "discovery"
Academia isn't the only field with this issue. I've seen "journalists" and news websites cite other articles they also wrote for their facts.
Finding useful papers among the dross has always been a challenge. My theory is that 99%of them aren't worth the paper they aren't written on!
This is why we trust the respected journals in our respective fields (nature, cell, science, New England journal of medicine for me). It’s not hard to ignore bad journals/paper mills
Luckily they are often not printed on paper
Especially any climate related subject...
@@manoo422 How to say you're a divorced from reality clown with brain stomped flat by fox lies without actually saying so - the comment...
They've known about this in science fiction since at least the 1940's. As with all science fiction, science eventually catches up.
I'm concerned about Larry doing research. Curiosity is famously unhealthy for cats.
cats do badly in quantum physics. they put them in boxes and then claim they are both alive and dead at the same time!
@@bigcubistman Sure, but they have 4 & 1/2 half lives.
Excellent.
Corruption creeps into everything
capitalism*
Less about corruption more about money and they way that grants are awarded ie popularity contest
@@southcoastinventors6583 if that's not a corrupt system I don't know what is
@@ThatOpalGuy How is state-funded research capitalism? If anything, it's socialism-like because tax dollars are taken by force an redistributed to the well-connected.
@@doggo6517 For these reductivist simpletons, "Corruption" = "Capitalism". They will destroy any nuance, system, or construction in the name of their "X = Y" crusade of reductivist idiocy.
By even mentioning state-funded research, you've overloaded their circuits; this does not compute with their black and white world view of EVERYTHING !
Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken . Chicken , chicken chicken , chicken chicken chicken chicken ? Chicken.
Dr. Meow Whiskers Phd.
What's going on with this obsession
Probably paid many boks for those citations.
You omitted the citations of the tuna papers.
In fairness most of academia's felines perk right up when they hear the Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken paper recited.
@@THX..1138 everyone is doing it everyone is living
Classic, the manager/administration class using a stupid key performance indicator (kpi) to indicate something that it doesn’t.
On the other hand I fail to see what is an actual alternative? If we don't have metrics, I think the only reasonable alternative is having a neutral reviewer from outside the field? Or everyone acting as a reviewer for others. And that has it's own set of problems.
Do we have to privatize all research and let the free markets come up with something? Because I can already tell, that markets won't magically come up with anything new, the entrepreneurs are only human after all, they will come with the same stupid metrics and nothing will change in the end.
@@JanVerny Privatization of research is a good way to kill civilization because only short sighted, short term cash grabs will be funded. 99% of all huge scientific and economic breakthroughs in the last 500 years were funded by public money, without it we would still be in feudalism with token steam engines appearing in mines and lumber mills...
trust me. it is not perfect, but the best, so far, measure as KPI.
@@JanVerny The problem is different for each field in academia but at the end of the day everything falls into one single umbrella. For example, in mathematics the most important thing is that the results presented are correct and the second important thing is that they are relevant to some other research in some way. This is a rather low bar but it tends to work fine. If we are talking about physics we obviously want results to actually be useful in explaining something so we need a higher bar.
Turn the classes against each other while the elite laugh.
I had a professor that had a stuffed animal with several published papers and an honorary degree.
Bet he's sitting on a cushy job in a plush office.
One of my papers on spiking neurons got cited by a homeopathy paper - which contains over 400 citations most of which have nothing to do with homeopathy. It's ridiculous.
Y'know, for the longest time I thought "homeopathy" was an operation to separate two friends that had been fused together.
@@swistedfilmsHomieopathy?
@@swistedfilmsthat would be a homiectomy
It was homeopathetic.
Homeopathy has nothing to do with homeopathy.
I've gotten several emails straight up offering me money to either add certain authors to my papers, or cite specific papers in my own publications. Hiring and awarding grants based on H-index has to end if academia is to survive.
I worked in commercial research all my career. In theory there was a great reality check, whether your innovations worked and made money. But in practice, patents were often the "currency" for commercial scientists instead of published papers. And there are an awful lot of nonsense patents.
😂😂😂 in china right !?!?
If the goal is money and not progress its not surprising
@@southcoastinventors6583 it's the literature thing I think it should be limited to institutions only I mean for study and that's it
@@JamilaJibril-e8h If you want papers to be credible then each one of then needs to reproduced a year or more after being published similar to a patent pending. If something is not reproduceable in not science.
@@southcoastinventors6583 oh is that a threat or stealing excuses if it's copyright by school or institution or creative individual it wont work if it's produced or not
Back in the 90s when I was looking for a job, I wrote a joke CV for a bull terrier. I included letters of recommendation and a parody publication list. I'd send the dog's info first and follow it with my resume and an apology letter saying the dog had gotten on my computer unbeknown to me. I didn't get any interviews.
Everything was better in the 90s.
I’ve published two papers in scientific journals. I once did a reverse reference lookup to see if anyone cited my papers in their own articles. I found that two authors referenced my work but upon reading their work discovered that they BOTH misunderstood the conclusions of my paper! They both misunderstood my article and thus used my citation incorrectly. I pretty much lost confidence in peer-reviewed studies after that.
Alas, who's going to review the peer reviewer? Oh yeah, Sabrine of course. She'll kick some lieing butt.
Authors love to cite paper in high impact papers for no reason. They get away with it because they know that most reviewers don't read the citations.
Journals usually take feedback for things like that and it might lead to retraction.
@@user255 one of our former post-docs could not get a paper through peer review because one the reviewers wanted him to cite his own work. We ended up having to add discussion to the paper in order to cite his work.
Reporting to the journal does nothing but get you triaged before review even occurs
@@joshua43214 Hard to believe, which journal? I would report that and the case of the OP anonymously. Journal without reputation is not much worth of anything.
The classic case is to publish a paper with some gross error in it. The result is lots of people publish papers citing you for your terrible mistake. Viola lots of citations.
Witness cold fusion claims many years back
This is how you get answers on tech forums. Post a question and it gets ignored. Post a question with one account, then give an incorrect answer with another. People jump out of the woodwork to correct the wrong answer. It must be someone's Law, by now.
It's clear that maximizing the number of papers published and the number of citations is not a good incentive structure for advancing scientific knowledge. In fact it may be doing more harm than good at this point. I wonder what a better incentive structure would look like.
I'd propose an hierarchy of reviewers. There would be sort of a long-lasting grand jury at the top of it, maintained the same way as the boards that accredit colleges and physicians?
Unfortunately we cannot measure quality, only quantity, and accountants, personnel departments (etc.) can only judge quantity. Citations were intended to measure quality, but as several other comments have observed, Goodhart's law cuts in, and they end up being corrupted by scams such as these.
@ b43xoit a "jury-pyramid" only grants a few power to make or break a career.. hoping for 'reluctant philosophers' to be the only ones showing up for those positions is.. well, "not realistic" to put it friendly.
the incentive structure of the whole of society is broken from the ground up as our currency has got a technical flaw (since ancient times) that creates a monopol that is only "happy" if the economy grows exponentially.. reality can't, thus all those symptoms (of which this is just one) appear.
Alas, my cat is irredeemably lazy and has yet to produce so much as a post-it note - much less any significant body of influential intellectual analyses.
One word for you: catnip
@@BeKind-ve4id Definitely worth a shot! 😸
@@BeKind-ve4idmy cat doesnt react to it 😪
Yet he has a PhD.
@@dammitdan106 his PhD is proudly displayed at the bottom of his litter box
When the referees' comments come in with a helpful list of papers you might cite. All by the same person. When you must cite all of your supervisor's papers. When the environmental group helping you asks you to "just add a sentence or two about what this implies for managing the environment". This has been visible for over a decade.
One thing I´ve learned on this channel is to tell actual gibberish from academic gibberish. Thank you once more and keep it up, please
A study years ago showed that impenetrable prose resulted in higher rankings for science papers.
What you definitely should't learn from this channel is how to _pronounce_ "gibberish".
@@vinylarchaeologist😅 If it´s important, you are right since German is my first language too, and I intuitively would have pronounced it like she did.
@@Thomas-gk42 Haha, liebe Grüße!
@@vinylarchaeologist This reminds me of the debate about how to pronounce GIF.
The go-to paper is 'Google Scholar is manipulatable', Hazem Ibrahim, Fengyuan Liu, Yasir Zaki, Talal Rahwan, which only has 7 citations itself.
The main problem is the wide spread of formal quantitative measures (that can be manipulated) for scientists' evaluations, be it on the grant stage, hiring stage, or promotion stage. No surprise that such measures become the target. Basically, we asked it to be the target.
There is a similar thing happening in medicine. If someone comes in with a stubbed toe you can earn a lot more money by doing a complete history and physical, an X-ray, a CT scan, a MRI and extensive blood testing. Then you tell the patient they have a stubbed toe and send them home with instructions to ice and elevate.
The same thing happens with cars. Take the car in for an oil change and leave with new tires, brakes, muffler, windshield wiper blades.
They do the 27-point inspection so they can sell you the store.
Couldn’t academia adopt something like view count, like/dislike buttons, 0-5 star reviews, and comments for these digital papers so that citations alone wouldn’t be the only proxies for “did anyone actually read this” and “did they all pan it as total BS or not?”.
Basically, a mix of YT or Rumble and Amazon interfaces for giving feedback on something & having all other users see it. You could even limit write access to members of universities and similar institutions, break down the results by (say) tenured professors in the field vs. grad vs. undergrad students, etc. Possibly even do what stack overflow does and clearly indicate that “This 3-star, mixed negative review is the expert consensus” & outright remove papers that get flagged as spam or total garbage. After awhile such an interactive arXiv would become the default repo and review arena for entire fields, as the original did for fundamental physics, and the fraudsters would have to seriously up their game to keep up.
To me it would restore some sanity by enabling a de facto form of totally decentralized peer review in the same manner the origin arXiv transformed publication. Who actually read, reviewed, etc. a publication would be a matter of public record. If basically nobody reads it then a giant citation count is a much more obvious red flag. Citation count alone would cease to be the only metric or even the metric most people join that space used, making it easier to finally push the administration and bureaucrat types to use something a bit more complex & nuanced.
Noome does that though. Irl you come im witj a stubbed toe, wait for six hours get called a junkie and to go home
@@stewiesaidthatlargely because noone maintains their cars.
Only in places where medicine is for-profit. In the UK, if I go to my doctor with a stubbed toe there's no financial incentive for them to do anything but ice-and-levitate.
RUclipsr Dr Mike Israetel got his PhD by writing a 124 page thesis that says fat people can't jump as high as skinny people.
This is why an old fashioned library, a building, stacks, librarian, and the works were so important. Online makes it easy to scheme. Paper libraries had to pay for the paper copies. This cost money, and so only reputable journals were available. Go up into the stacks and the books that look shiny and new are the ones to avoid. Pay attention to the books whose covers are worn, that is, well loved. Can't do that with digital papers and books.
That's not really true. Non-reputable journals were cheaper that reputable journals. So from a purely monetary point of view, there was an incentive to put non-reputable journals in the library.
And I'm not just speaking theoretically; I remember finding a shelve with a journal where even a short look into it told me that this is esoteric, not science. And yes, it was the physics section of the library.
@__christopher__ What is not really true? There were and always have been esoteric journals. In a print library, someone had to request them and secure funding. Ther equestor thought them worth while.
The math equation in the "Chicken" paper only contained the letters C H I K E N!
lol, that's ironic attention to details!
Unfortunately, I saw a typo on that paper "chckens", just above the math.
@@xorman "S" was also used in equations, so I believe that was deliberate.
"Academic success starts and ends wirth your personal connections" That is not necessarily linked to the discussed problem. I would even argue that this statement is the most accurate explanation of what a PhD is good for. Ive tried to keep track of all the publications in all well-known journals that cover my research topic, but it's simply impossible to do so. There is no other way to rely on personal connections. My very first scientific publication reached the 50 citations mark today. Most of the citing authors are unkown to me, but if you follow their connections you realize that they are all from the same bubble.
Assuming you didn't explain dark matter or something of similar impact, I'd assume that people who read your paper come from a small group.
my most cited academic paper was cited from people ranging from astrophysicists to apple reaping agricultural researchers. but i think that is rather not too common. the rest is like you say, a paper a bubble.
That explains why many sh*tty papers have a lot of citations
Have you ever encountered what could be described as a mutual citation society where a cluster of academics in some sub-niche continuously cite each other?
I notice that Doug Zonker's "Chicken" paper was shown. I had the great pleasure and honor of seeing the live presentation in 12-minute conference format. Two "questions" were planted in the audience, and that was equally hilarious.
I love the internet... With a few clicks of a mouse I could become a top scientist, get doctorate in Phrenology and become a Lord of Scotland 🤣
It's funny but it does serve to debase real accomplishments.
Hey, _Pay To Win_ ftw. That's life now.
Mouse licker!
there was a time it was only who's who! by mail! 😂😂😂
One other thing that annoys me about this is that there are already people who don't trust science. This will worsen that.
This isn't science, this is a paperwork problem. The methodology of science is going stronger than ever
The flat-earth camp has suddenly become more credible. 😕🧐
There is "science the methodology" and Science(tm). No one should trust Science(tm). It's not "science"; it's "scientism".
I named my cat Aristotle, so he gets cited in a lot of philosophy papers.
Mine's named Plato. He lives on a purrfect plane.
Your cat is a philosofur? Mine is just a sunbeam critic, but it pays the bills.
Name your cat Et Al and you will be on almost all the big papers.
Here is the current academic culture: peer review has been irreparably broken, scammers are everywhere, including most esteemed members of the research community, and those research grants would be awarded to one of the most successful scammers. It's literally a modern dark age.
To me it doesn't sound irreparable.
Who cares? Keep the joy. And keep pubblishing 🎉
The basic problem is the obsession with metrics. “You’re a 10, I’m an 11 and therefore worth more than you” and so on. It has totally poisoned scientific endeavour, particularly academic research, where it has just become a continuous pointless churn. It is largely down to politicians and public funding bodies who obsess with simple values to rank everything and then wonder why so much effort is then put into gaming them.
What other metric are public funding bodies supposed to rely on when theirs funds are limited and they need to figure out who to give it to?
A more interesting question would also be why public funding is under such a pressure in the first place.. which leads us to a technical flaw in currency that exists for at least 2500 years.
@@joansparky4439 Make it the true lottery it already is. Random choice cannot be worse. And it would not need any resources. Now public funding bodies need thousands of reviewers each time they want to give away their grants, stealing life and research time from all of them, possibly inflicting more damage just by this, than gaining anything by the process itself.
@@joansparky4439Don't use metrics, do the footwork.
You are absolutely right. The rot started maybe 30 years ago when commercial publishers started buying up the small and rigorous academic journals produced by learned societies. Once it became a business, it became a game and we call got conned into playing it....
There is a joke about Schroedinger in here somewhere, but it appears to be in superposition...
to entangled for me to distinguish...🙁
The particle physicists citing each other reminds me of how politicians in the US often write bills with funding sources that don't actually exist. There's a passage from a book called "The Deficit Myth" where one politician is overheard saying to another "I voted for your bill even though your pay-for is BS"
How does this work?
@@eingyi2500 Most likely a mix of three things: Blatant corruption with some surreptitious connection to the politician's personal affairs; Incompetent politicians who don't understand how legislation should be properly written; or laziness on the assumption that the money will come from somewhere but that will be someone else's problem.
A prof once told us in a lecture that Socrates never published. He then asked the class "Who Killed Socrates?
I thought, "His agent?"
his university had a vote of sorts.
Socrates asked too many questions, taught others in this tech and thus was a problem for the beneficiaries of the status quo - who were personally incentivized to hold onto it and thus got a simple majority organized to solve this problem.. which in turn caused Plato to write 'The Republic' in which he blamed 'the mob' for all of it.. Yay?!
While researching red velvet coatings for vircator use I found a "scientific paper" that was a recipe for red velvet cake on Research Gate.
But was the cake good?
I'm interested as to what uses, other than military, vircators are put to.
When I joined academia in the 1990s as a professor the honor system for refereeing was still fashionable. By the time I retired in the 2010s (early but post tenure) it had all changed to things like h-index, impact factor, double-blind refereeing, publication "processing" charges often exceeding a thousand dollars per paper) in the open access case and so on. I think that there are things that money and social prestige can't buy, and they include scientific integrity and love for understanding nature and truth.
Citation frequency has ALWAYS been a bad method by which to assess research.
Kind of, the paradox is, as long its widely ignored it is a good measurement. Once people game the system its getting useless.
@@georgelionon9050 Any system that assumes that humans are honest is bound to fail.
People screaming: Trust the science!
The science: meow.
I'd trust that scientist.
@@tortenschachtel9498 I mean I trust cats more then anyone ignorantly screaming to trust the science. The only thing you can trust science to do is change theory based on new information and to use worse ideas to thy and fix the problems made by previous bad ideas. Outside of that once in a great while some breakthrough happens that would be great for humanity, and then someone decides to turn it into a weapon. So I can definitely understand how meow is a superior stance.
Best comment so far. It even cited prior memes
@@jhoughjr1 maybe so, but I have a feeling the people screaming trust the science won't give it a thumbs up and cats don't have thumbs.
Unfortunately science is still the most reliable way to know truths.
EDIT: I must reply here, because otherwise RUclips deletes my reply.
Yeah... somehow it is the science that put you into the Internet, gave you air-planes, GPS, antibiotics, gene editing, cellphones, etc, etc. Not the bible or any other "holy book" or any of the thousands of alleged gods.
When I was child I was in big troubles and I prayed god, no one answered. I tried other gods, no one answered. Then much later I was so convinced that none of that is real I mocked gods and prayed all the satans etc. Again no one answered. Honestly I cannot take praying seriously anymore. But I have read the Bible, and it is full of things that are factually wrong and/or morally wrong. It is clearly written by man of the time.
I appreciate how researchgate already has its scandal name built right into the site's name.
I’m a bit confused by this. Many researchers I know, including myself, have ResearchGate accounts. Apparently, so does Sabine. I’ve never uploaded any papers but do get frequent requests asking me to send some other researcher a copy. The copyright for some of my papers is held by the journal, but some are held by me (depends on the journal’s policy). I don’t send anything unless I am the copyright holder. It seems to me that the problem lies elsewhere, but I certainly agree that there is a problem.
That "chicken" paper looks like something that could be really written by my dog
Or Colonel Sanders.
Cats write better papers than dogs. They get more citations!😂
My cat has often said that if he believed everything he heard, he'd be a dog.
You're not going to like finding out where a lot of the news pushed to headlines comes from, then. "People familiar with their way of thinking" rumors cited, then cross-cited between news outlets as facts, each citing the others as support, in a self-licking ice cream cone. I trust the cat more.
Sabine, I always appreciate your content as a reminder to take my job as a researcher less serious. Ironically, I do better work when I ignore the administrative economy of metrics. Cheers!
Here's a classic example of Judith Butler:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Is that a real quotation?
Pseudo Marxist babble that says nothing
And she didn't make a fortune from the T-shirt sales?
@@EinsteinsHair Didn't make a fortune because only the XXXXXL size was big enough to fit it all. Big size, small market.
I know a philosopher who actually talks like this and gets invited to interviews (not in mainstream though).
when a metric becomes an objective it ceases to be a good metric
Well... that's wonderful.
I for one am very glad the equilibrium constant for Chicken chicken was finally determined.
I am totally familiar with this, but most of my citations are from the georgia state patrol. They are pretty bogus and have not helped my standing at all.
Imagine the implications over the past 20 years for things that are now active policy disputes.
Under: if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Finding papers has always been a huge issue, Sabine... Sometimes you hear about it, see a citation, but just can't find it. I hope some day someone creates a solution...
Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
There's also a problem with them being scattered through too many different journals, many of which I hadn't heard of. I keep a list of the journals I've found useful papers in, and it currently stands at 462, having found a new one (founded in 1948, I think) last week.
Reminds me of the early days of new (lazy) kinds of degrees, such as "Bachelor of Leisure Sciences".
What contribution to science are those people really providing?
Sabine, without you the rest of us would not be able to connect these dots towards truth.
How could we? It's not our thing.
Thank you and don't stop.
Crime invades the last open spaces in society? The very last one is of course farmaceuticals, or building rockets based on a cat's antigravity paper how to vertically land.
Good point. Maybe even a Nuzzle Prize
If you think farmaceuticals was last and not first you ve never heard of I.G.Farben.
Crime invades everything human touch you can only have honesty in extremely small groups were all actions are monitored by everyone
My friends are highly cited and have a great h score but still have trouble getting an academic positions, the video you should make is how university are hiring majority adjunct not salaried professors
We have learned through experience that religious authorities are not necessarily paragons of moral behavior. IT should not come as a surprise that academics are not immune to the lure of personal gratification either. What to do about it is the real question.
this is everywhere and based on how life itself works actually.. too bad our societies are based on the assumption that we do not behave that way and most people (esp on the L side of the poli spectrum) have a real problem accepting this reality.
5:57 it’s amazing how different corners of academia that rings so loudly true in
Big deal. My cat has published papers on inter universal Teichmuller theory.
Both as a fan of yours, and as someone who does not agree with you all the time, I want to pose a simple question in the interest of earnest discussion: What's the fix here?
The argument I'm getting is that "people should be more ethical" and that isn't really saying anything at the end of the day. How should we prioritize research? This to me all seems to be an unavoidable consequence of treating the marketplace of ideas as a LITERAL marketplace of ideas. This video gives me the impression that any for-profit motive in academic publication will lead us to Schrodinger's cats, at least the ones that write about Quantum Loop Gravity.
This is a classic case of goodheart's law, citations have become a target, so they are no longer a good measure
the problem is that any quantitative measure will become a target later on. in the future, maybe real science will be made by reputable people writing letters to other reputable people again...
Generations ago computer engineering developed the idea of web of trust, a technical solution where people could digitally vouch for each other, where you would be able to validate somebody many hops away from you based on relationships back to you.
These days it seems like such a shame that WoT implementations never caught on. From social media to academic publishing it seems like it would offer such value.
So I bring it up whenever I can. This is a solution that's out there, but unfortunately it's kind of stuck in a niche corner.
I believe one issue is that if the relationships are publicly visible then the system could be used to map everyone's social life and if the relationships were not publicly visible people could easily get coerced into marking someone as trustworthy.
@@MetalheadAndNerd oh one of the big features is that you can have a system where you can confirm if a and b are connected without having a list of connections for either a or b. That's part of the stuff that has been on the table for quite a long time.
But in this case I'm talking about the side of the system where people are happy to be connected with each other, happy to publicly certify each other as legit. It's the kind of situation where you can map it all you want and the participants would be happy to show up in the map.
Our cat, Luna Challis, has published 8 books on Amazon, but I doubt if anyone has ever cited her publications.
the " just not knowing about a possibly great scientific paper " reminds me of an article probably 20 years ago about a scientist who had spent 30 years figuring out a problem, only for someone on the other side of the world that happened to be working on it too ; just become famous world wide before the other guy could finish his own work. that has been my idea since then of what a scientists life is basically like.
that happens more often than people imagine. have you heard about william sutherland?
@@tonybrowneyed8277 no no havent
Keep up with this kind of reporting. Thanks.
Gödel would suggest that an ungameable system is impossible, and the tendency of people to game any system causes regulation to trend toward more rules and greater complexity, generally tending toward unwieldy beaurocracy. The only solution would seem to be an education system which teaches ethics. People need to internalize the principle that antisocial behavior is harmful, even when it isn't illegal.
Gosh, I didn't know that you can even buy citations, I thought that the citations' loops were already bad enough...! Thanks for talking about it
“Maybe, this year, for Thanksgiving we should eat seeds and pellets instead of Turkey.” -Dr. Gobbles, PhD, University of Chicago
Citation added for you.🦃🤣
at our academy, when reporting citations they have to come from Web of Science and listed with full tiles and names of journals etc, so I don't know who cares about google scholar citations?
I knew something was off about Dr Larry’s mouse chasing research!
Google's page-ranking algorithm originated as an academic paper loosely based on the concept of academic paper citations.
Remember Schroedinger's cat? This is him now. Feel old yet?
One way to solve this is to have a platform for video publications - a munscriipt is presented, reviewed, debated and these are published as a recording rather than paper publications.
WTF 😡
Also, your institution (at least your chair person or promotion committee) will discover that your citations are a scam and good luck getting promoted or even keeping your job.
I decided to make my career withn the engineering community as there is more opportunity for $$$$ there. I, and many many others, have done actual research that produces patentable concepts that actually result in productive work. Yet patents are considered as taboo and soiled because someone may have made money in the process. IMHO this is less questionable than many papers in the academic world as patents are generally expensive to obtain and maintain. Companies find little profit in obtaining patents unless they have a team of lawyers ready to sue patent violaters. Nonsense patents are rare as they are expensive. It is sad that pure academia seems as tainted (or more so) than the world of patents.
There are plenty of crap patents floating around. There are also plenty of scammy patent trolls who buy patents and then sue for profit or to stifle completion. Patent abuse abounds.
SOUND QUALTY: Sabine, I have been avidly watching your channel for several years, thank you. It’s very informative and very well presented. I have noticed though more recently that the vocal presentation is losing its clarity. Yes of course I’m getting older and I realise that my hearing is not what it used to be but if I do an A-B comparison with other channels where I can hear quite clearly, and then revert to your channel there is a definite lack of clarity in the sound on TV speakers. Slightly muffled is how I would describe it. I should declare that I do work within the Hi-Fi audio industry, and I am very accustomed to listening to sound systems of both professional and home setups. In the recording industry engineers who are experts in audio mastering are employed to shape the frequency response and dynamics of the broadcast sound to make it compatible with the likely devices or media it’s being listened to on. ie TV, tablets, headphones et.c. I’m not suggesting that you employ one of these mastering engineers on a permanent due to the high cost but I’m sure your recording engineer would be able to shape the sound to make it a bit more intelligible especially on TV speakers (which inherently are poor quality anyway which is a problem of course). Anyway keep up the excellent work. Thanks SP Australia
Further to this, I just noticed the mic placement on your latest video (10/9/24 ‘magical equation unites) and it is quite close to your mouth. As a former stage vocalist I was taught that close-mic technique would accentuate the lower frequency end giving a warmer more lush sound compared with moving the mic away which thins out the sound, reduces bass boominess but in doing so enhances clarity of the higher frequencies (read ‘cleaner/clearer sound”. Often it is the bass boominess that can render a voice unclear as the bass notes wash out the higher frequencies. Anyway, just an observation.
i dont think ill be doing a phd
"Dr Bellingham". Has a nice ring to it . Go for it, bru.
Richardson = not Rick Cardson. Instead it is pronounced: Rich Ard Son
Gibberish = not Geeb Ersih. Instead it is pronounced: Gee Berish
Sorcerers apprentice comes to mind more and more.
That Richardson/Hossenfelder collaboration has the hallmarks of a future Nobel prize.
I imagine the cat is already working on his acceptance speech!
It seems that any research paper that uses the phrases "It is well known that..." or "It has long been shown that..." without footnotes should be regarded with suspicion.
Honestly I haven't seen that phrase in a paper, ever.
@@Milan_Openfeint I was referring to the excerpt shown in the vid.
So depressing. Thanks, Sabine.
Pronunciation guide - gibberish uses a soft "g" rather than a hard "g." Not G as in Germany, but more like "J" in Journal.
Thanks!
You mean "not G as in 'gallery'".
@@SabineHossenfelder He means: not hard G as in Goose, but soft G in Germany or J in Journal.
It starts with g, we don't say Jalileo instead of Galileo.... Common people says otherwise, well it's not the first time that common people are not right
Anyone know how English ended up having the same letter represent two different sounds that aren't even made with the same regions of the mouth? Is it related to Arabic's gimmel vs jimmel? (And how did Arabic ever lump the two together?)
Time for a real change.
It's incredible that Sabine can make a video like this, which clearly shows the PROFIT MOTIVE as the source of these problems, but never make that connection, and indeed make another video titled "Capitalism is Good 👍"
The idea that enshittification could actually apply to science itself is kind of frightening, but all too obvious in retrospect. Since the enshittification concept applies to almost every other aspect of our lives these days and especially to all technological matters, I guess no one should be surprised by this turn of events. Worried, yes, very much. But not surprised.
The first step is cracking down on paper mills and the publishers that enable them
I'm enjoying so much these videos. And learning some physics and math along the way. Thanks!!!
Sabine participates in the scam! She co-authored a paper with the cat! Oh no! I will never trust these videos again!
Sabine:😽
The main problem in social sciences is, as Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose demonstrated, "real" and "gibberish" papers are now indistinguishable. The problem is with the domain not being a verifiable science.
it is verifiable.. one just has to start of where biology ends. Social science doesn't do that unfortunately, but rather makes up it's basics, which then leads to wrong theses.
The problem is not that the domain of study is not scientific, "merely" that the bar for publication is far too low. Insistence on rigorous statistical and experimental methodology would eliminate 99% of bad work in the fields, and little of the good. But that of course is why it's not done: it would also eliminate 90% of the researchers in these fields.
Good work in the social sciences is certainly verifiable. The problem is corruption, not the area of study.
I see the paper that claims the interplay between non-local magic and entanglement in quantum manybody systems, 'Gravitational back-reaction is magical', only has 2 citations.
Gravitational backreaction refers to the effect that matter and energy have on the curvature of spacetime, which in turn affects the motion and behavior of that matter and energy.
Claiming it's magical rather defeats the purpose. Of course they've already dualed it, like the Higgs, and use the Maldacena conjecture. Nice, if you can get away with it. The conjecture posits that a theory of quantum gravity in an AdS space is equivalent to a CFT on the boundary of that space. This allows physicists to study strongly interacting quantum field theories using the more mathematically tractable weakly interacting gravitational theories.
Hey, maybe we could train AIs to vet these papers BEFORE they're accepted by pre-print servers? Let's use LLMs for good instead of evil!
Then we have LLMs reading papers written by LLMs so no human have to do anything. Yes there are papers where the "authors" haven't even bothered to check what the LLMs have written.
You are building the discriminator to a Genrator-Discriminator model. naively you can just use the output of the discriminator the loss function of a generator llm and boom - the better your discriminator gets the better the generator llm gets at making up fake papers
A bit like Douglas Adams' Electric Monk.
AI is probably being trained on this stuff and citation count might be used as measure of success to reward it. :-(
@@lubricustheslippery5028 This is a bit like complaining about society having both burglars and museum guards. Like one side is clearly in the wrong here and you need the other to clean up after their mess. We need AI vetting *because* there is AI fraud, you can't combat this shit with just human reviewers
Thank you for not using the doorbell sound in this video (and for your content)! I have a Wyze doorbell and every time your videos play that sound, my dog races to the window or front door barking. Although it might also be quite comical to see a video have a trigger warning for dogs... because that's the kind of society this has become.
So that's what Larry the Cat has been doing in his well-earned retirement. Didn't really see him as the kind of cat that would spend his retirement curled up in front of a fireplace all day.
The endpoint of this chain of junk journals will be the formalization of list of high-quality ((non-junk) journals. Groups that want to vet citation rankings will use such a list to sort out junk journals. This would be a relatively trivial, technological feat that will at least temporarily weaken the impact of these journals.
And there is no end in cite. What a cat-astrophe.
* cat-ass-trophy