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Researchers Feel Pressure To Cite Superfluous Papers
ananyo writes "One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published in the journal Science (abstract), also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce. The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal's impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations an article in the journal receives over two years). But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls 'coercive citation,' and shows that this is 'uncomfortably common.' Perhaps the most striking finding of the survey was that although 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal's prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce. However, figures from Thomson Reuters suggest that social-science journals tend to have more self-citations than basic-science journals."
The surest way to get something on Wikipedia, is get something published then cite it. Accuracy notwithstanding.
I think we know the number one culprit here, ahem [citation needed] ahem.
This is what happens when you have metrics. You create a metric like "impact factor", and before long people will figure out ways to maximize "impact factor" that have nothing to do what the metric was originally supposed to measure. Hyperfocusing on metrics like that ends up undermining the things you really value in favor of increasing your scores.
This happens all over the place. Games in every game find ways to increase their score in ways that the game designers wouldn't really consider valid. Universities do things simply to make their "US News" ratings go up, not because they will make themselves better. Students figure out ways to raise their grades that have nothing to do with mastering the material of the course. Heck, the entire US (and world?) economy suffers from this; the most reliably rich people are the ones who manipulate money transactions, and do absolutely nothing with the underlying reality that money is supposed to be an abstract representation of.
People strive to improve the things that they are rewarded for and that they are evaluated on. When you focus too much on the wrong thing, people will do the wrong things in response.
Not exactly on topic but nevertheless an interesting read:
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @dainsanefh
I have bad news for you ... dig deep enough, and you find out all the other 'sciences' suffer from exactly the same problems.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Who modded this flamebait? It's right on point.
But to ignore previous authors might be disrespectful. But isn't the citing of authors used for extrapolation?
... in the last sentence of the summary. I think the word you're looking for is "Naturally."
When the start referencing Brittany Spears song for their social relevance then I'll take exception.
dig deep enough, and you find out all the other 'sciences' suffer from exactly the same problems.
As a recovering Mathematician I take issue with that.
Hint: There is one science founded (mostly) on logic that doesn't let reality get in the way of quality navel gazing.
What goes around, comes around. Considering this is basically the norm for student essays, it was only a matter of time until the students became the professors, and the professors fully saturated the journal editorial boards. It is just a promotion of the status quo to a level it is visibly a bad thing, really.
Great Intellect...
Yeah, let's all just accept Peano's axioms, shall we? Mathematics is founded on air.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Shocked [3][12][21], I tell you! [4][7]! Studies [14][17][31] have shown [11][15] that this [26] never [21][22] happens [25] with reputable [5][14][24] papers [19]! How could this [32] have happened? [12][16]
Check your premises.
I put together an economics paper and sent it around to a few PhDs I know. Two of them came back with the exact response that this article indicates; "It needs more references if you want to get published." I asked if the math, logic, or conclusions were off, both responded they were not, but that was not the point. They made it clear that to get published it had to have more references to existing work, regardless of the content.
I can come up with arguments why such a policy has some merit -- keeping wacky stuff like modern monetary theory's hypothesis that there is no such thing as too much debt from distracting researchers, for example -- but good, bad, or indifferent; the fact that there is a barrier to papers which do not pay homage to existing academics is very real.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
They aren't all horrible - just mostly. I have a great respect for Anthropology, which while being sort of a social science, tends to hold to actual scientific standards more than made up fields like sociology (the non-rigorous version) or psychology (naming and categorizing personal problems). Even more so, considering it is usually on the firing line by creationists for constantly figuring out how things actually happened in humanity's evolution.
I can tolerate most of the other fields, with the exception of economics. Economics is not simply nonsense, it is nonsense which poses a direct danger to humanity, by acting as if social systems are as simple as garbage in, garbage out. Almost every field of economics is consistently shown to be unable to make usable predictions, and make suggestions which result in unintended consequences, yet they still are allowed to influence politics without people even considering it strange. Let "social science" waste university money, but I say we need to be wary of people who habitually claim wealth inequality and deregulation are good things...
Great Intellect...
I won't dispute the thin air plucking of axioms - but that wasn't what the original poster alluded to - with which you swept all of science under the same rug:
Their only connection to science is that they attempt to use statistics, often improperly.
My point remains that Mathematical logic (alone?) is a science concerned with tautological proofs, not based on "closest enough" statistical significance.
I did RTFA. The authors of the paper surveyed 54,000 academics, and about 1,300 responded to say, "Yes we felt pressured." That's 2.5%. Only 1/3 of those named a single journal that pressured them. Another 2.5% said, "We've heard that others have been pressured, but never us." 7.5% said, "We've never heard of it." And 87.5% didn't respond. The survey shows extreme self-selection as 7 of 8 academics did not respond. So before someone gets excited that 20% of academics are pressured, note that under 13% of academics responded.
They're being asked to pad their paper because the actual evidence being cited might not look that convincing on it's own right. And many of the conclusions aren't properly supported. Come on, we all had that experience writing papers. You've got a deadline, you're trying to get from point A to point B and you just don't have enough to make it all the way. So you make a statement you don't have support for and then link it to source material you know no one will read. So it looks like your conclusion is supported when in fact it isn't. You don't care though because the point is to get from point A to point B... and the only person you have to fool is the teacher or in this case the peer review that probably doesn't care that much anyway. Also... everyone else is doing it... and for the teacher to actually verify all those citations would be pretty much impossible. The only thing you have to be careful of is to not say something the teacher knows is false or will think is false. If you do that they might check the citation. But if you go outside of their knowledge forcing them to basically check everything or nothing... or stick closely to whatever the teacher is likely to believe anyway... you can get away with about 99 times out of a hundred. And the time you're caught... slap on the wrist or a small hit to your grade.
Now I have no experience with what happens when you actually start publishing things. I fully admit my ignorance here. But I'd be surprised if an academic history conditioned by this environment didn't predispose graduates to try the same thing. And really, who is going to stop them? They've had their whole academic career to perfect the best ways to scam the system. All those years they weren't just learning the subject but they were also learning how the subject is taught, how it is graded, the social characteristics of their judges, human psychology as it relates to auditing, etc. We learn all this stuff naturally.
Anyway, that there is fraud in academia isn't shocking. All human interactions involve fraud. If there's a benefit in deceiving someone then we probably do it and we get very good at it. This is indifferent to morality. It has more to do with intelligence. If you're clever whether you're a good person or a bad person... you learn to lie. Even if you don't use it for evil it's just a skill you acquire.
If there is anything I find bothersome here it is the conspiratorial aspect where someone is encouraged to decieve others. This sort of thing is marginally less offensive when it's kept isolated to individuals even if everyone is doing it. And really what people SHOULD be doing rather then finding bogus sources is find ACTUAL sources.
It's actually not useful to anyone if it's fifty percent bullshit. I don't care if it's half brilliant and half bullshit. Even ten percent bullshit isn't acceptable. Strip out everything that isn't backed by bullshit. If you can't get from point A to point B without using bullshit sources then maybe those two dots don't actually connect. I know you need to make a connection and maybe you are even required to make that specific connection because your peers won't tolerate anything short of it. But that isn't science and it isn't academically useful. Sure you get your grade or you get your degree or you get your job or you get paid. You get what you want. But you do it at the expense of system's integrity.
I don't know... it's hard to audit this stuff without investing unreasonable numbers of man hours.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yeah, but if you go down that path, you wind up with mathematics being nothing but a tool, more a part of the process of science than science itself. Mathematics alone tells us nothing about the universe, other than that mathematics can be derived in it (and then you get back to whether or not you've really derived anything since the foundation is ultimately belief).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Not all economists habitually claim that wealth inequality and deregulation are good things. Also there is a strong movement to get economics away from simply math-based models and starting to use more empirical data. For example - if you take any decent class on international trade, you should find countless examples that disprove the basic models that have been around for ages. The Heckscher-Ohlin and Ricardian models (two of the most basic models upon which trade is based) have been tested and found wanting, especially H-O. Ricardian has been modified and updated somewhat but it still contains flaws. Newer models such as the New Trade Theory (inventive naming schemes abound! there's also a New New Trade Theory) and the Gravity Model have come into vogue, especially with the advent of FTAs in the past 20 years and the WTO.
As for monetary policy, it has certainly been the unfortunate case that in America and the UK (and to a certain degree Canada - although with Harper and his cronies with their goddamned majority it's sure to increase) the Austrian school has been prominent. However, people are starting to see that regulation needs to be enforced. If we look at the differences in banking between Canada and the US for example, we can see that Canada has fewer regulations, but enforcement is stricter and penalties more severe. I'm not, by the way, advocating that the Canadian banking system is without flaws, just that it tends to be less volatile, and their practices are less risky due to the regulations being observed. Now obviously the US is not going to adopt the Canadian banking system wholesale, but there are lessons to be learned.
There is a growing understanding that economists need to look at bigger pictures, and so political economy and comparative governance are big fields of study now.
I know that being on a board dominated by engineers and "hard" scientists this post will probably get downmodded, but it's important to recognize that there is a great diversity in the opinions of professional economists, and many of the younger generation will not buy into the simple ideas of "deregulate, lower taxes, and eliminate minimum wage".
Yeah, but if you go down that path, you wind up with mathematics being nothing but a tool, more a part of the process of science than science itself.
It's an interesting point that gave me pause. Without doubt it is a tool, but I'm not sure that it's a given that research around the tool isn't science.
Your suggestion started to make me consider science as only being related to subjects with probabilities where we can measure and test how close we are getting - but my gut is saying that view is too narrow.
http://xkcd.com/435/
Maybe there is some sort of Internet Reference Counter worming its way through the Web. It looks at papers, and gives points to people who get referenced a lot. People who reference you are tallied as your friends, so you will know to reference them. People who publish in your area, but don't reference you, are foes, and get negative points. You can buy or sell references or points on eBay and pay for them with Bitcoins. People with lots of points are "Blue Chip" in the points futures markets. Points can be used to suppress rival research.
Hey, doesn't Facebook or Google do this already . . . ? . . . for an extra fee ? . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Indeed, science itself is poorly defined! (Or perhaps, there are just a lot of opinions about what it is.)
I have only a BS level math background, and so I struggle on the issue myself ... Math is very different from everything else 'science', almost a category unto itself. If you throw everything else out of the science category for being probability based, why not just call math math (seems more convenient), and put everything else in a new category. Which we could call science for the sake of argument. ;-)
As an aside, many have been the days I wished my brain had enough aptitude for math to get to a phd. Math is beautiful, but apparently not destined for me.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Researchers Misunderstand Confidence Intervals and Standard Error Bars.
Belia, Sarah;Fidler, Fiona;Williams, Jennifer;Cumming, Geoff
Psychological Methods, Vol 10(4), Dec 2005, 389-396.
Little is known about researchers' understanding of confidence intervals (CIs) and standard error (SE) bars. Authors of journal articles in psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and medicine were invited to visit a Web site where they adjusted a figure until they judged 2 means, with error bars, to be just statistically significantly different (p .05). Results from 473 respondents suggest that many leading researchers have severe misconceptions about how error bars relate to statistical significance, do not adequately distinguish CIs and SE bars, and do not appreciate the importance of whether the 2 means are independent or come from a repeated measures design. Better guidelines for researchers and less ambiguous graphical conventions are needed before the advantages of CIs for research communication can be realized.
(http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/met/10/4/389/)
So, assuming you study this stuff: please explain why "deregulate, lower taxes, and eliminate minimum wage bad"?
money and career depend on what a brainless bean-counter adds up in a spread sheet.
Thus proving that it's not science, but simply people pushing their personal opinions draped in the prestige of science.
If they don't buy into it, then they will be ignored, because the libertarian hands-off mantra better serves the interests of the vultures who want to loot the society while there's still some meat on the bones.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Also there is a strong movement to get economics away from simply math-based models and starting to use more empirical data.
The fact that there's scope for such a movement to exist is, in itself, quite an indictment of the current state of the field, don't you think?
At Griffith University, Australia, we took a "Philosophy of Science" subject as part of the degree - mostly based on the philosophy of Karl Popper.
Basically, Science is:
Observable
Repeatable
Falsifiable and
Communicated.
I've always found this definition useful.
I'd argue that the problem with Economics isn't the science conducted in it, but rather what happens to it once large businesses with ulterior motives twist it to the view they want.
Love this comic, but there's a lot of field-specific knowledge that this view ignores.
Thus proving that it's not science, but simply people pushing their personal opinions draped in the prestige of science.
Oh I forgot there are no differing opinions in science. I guess Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins agree completely on how evolution works.
if you want to publish the bleeding obvious, you'd better cite my prior work in the area.
So, assuming you study this stuff: please explain why "deregulate, lower taxes, and eliminate minimum wage bad"?
Deregulation - do you really need me to provide examples of why unfettered deregulation is bad? The banking example I provided above shows that simplifying regulation but ensuring enforcement can be much more effective than just straight deregulation.
Lower taxes - I'm assuming that you like civilization and the benefits provided to you by your government - things like roads, sewage treatment, fire and police services, courts of law etc.? These things generally cost money and since society as a whole benefits from having them, it makes sense that they should be provided by the government, as otherwise you'll be creating huge social unrest when people who cannot afford to pay for the services run by private companies decide they've had enough. Taxes pay for these services.
Eliminating minimum wage - here's a decent pdf that sums it up in clear language: http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2007/0501.pdf
In my (former researcher who left to industry) opinion/experience its not the editors who put the pressure, but the possibility that you ignored a work of somebody who is important enough to referee for Nature or Science. There are some components of these phenomena:
a) Maybe the work really is important, and you did not know it because it's too long ago. There is usually nothing wrong with a referee saying "hey that is similar to what [xyz]" did, even if they are on the list of authors on the reference in question.
b) some referees dont react positively to not getting cited and will shoot down any paper not referring to *their* theory for other reasons (i believe that happened to me once)
c) In the abstract (which is the part really read by the editors before the refereeing process) you compare your paper to the previous publications. Authors are under the impression that comparing your work to previous important papers makes a better impression. How far this is true i cant judge. I found the editor stage *before* the refereeing in Nature and Science the most intransparent thing I have experienced as an author. Unlike the refereeing process there is no way to appeal, there is not information on what the editors disliked so much to refuse directly. (There is the saying that once you had Nature/Science papers it gets more likely to pass this stage, and i have seen at least one example of a paper being passed to Nature which for sure would have been rejected by the editors had it come from a less important group in the field)
in fact, these kids got their research published without any references *at all*. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/site/misc/BlackawtonBees.xhtml
i particularly like the section headings "once upon a time" and "the puzzle duh duh duhhhhh". i think however in the context of this article, the following exerpt from the background puts the corruption that has been highlighted by TFA to shame:
"So what follows is a novel study (scientifically and conceptually) in ‘kids speak’ without references to past literature, which is a challenge. Although the historical context of any study is of course important, including references in this instance would be disingenuous for two reasons. First, given the way scientific data are naturally reported, the relevant information is simply inaccessible to the literate ability of 8- to 10-year-old children, and second, the true motivation for any scientific study (at least one of integrity) is one's own curiousity, which for the children was not inspired by the scientific literature, but their own observations of the world. This lack of historical, scientific context does not diminish the resulting data, scientific methodology or merit of the discovery for the scientific and ‘non-scientific’ audience. On the contrary, it reveals science in its truest (most naive) form, and in this way makes explicit the commonality between science, art and indeed all creative activities."
What does intelligent design indicate about the current state of the field? If you have a point make it, instead of asking leading questions.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
This comment is clearly written by someone who has no idea what anthropology, sociology and psychology are. The "non rigorous" comment is particularly laughable, because clearly you have no knowledge of epistemology and the evolution (ahem!) of your own theories of what makes knowledge. Sociologists and anthropologists must study research methods, be examined on that knowledge, and better yet, understand their own role in the production of knowledge.
I'd take a sociologist over a scientist any day when it comes to understanding why or how a thing becomes a "scientific fact."
wow, congratulations, after 150+ years, this 'science' is starting to maybe finally think about using the idea that you should use actual data from the real world in your formulation of theory. brilliant concept. let me know how it works out.
evaluate its theories, and whether or not they match reality. because, as mentioned elsewhere, economics is the only 'science' where nobody cares about actually measuring reality. they come up with a bunch of theories, get payed fat 'consultant' bonuses by corrupt leaders, and live in a state of suspended, deluded animation.
a great example is from Ferguson's film "Inside Job", where he flat out proves that professors took money to lie about the state of Iceland's banking system right before it fell into the abyss circa 2008. in what other field of science do 'researchers' get payed hundreds of thousands of dollars to write up theories proving the conclusions of their benefactors? it would be like if electrical engineers were payed to say that 8 bit register can hold 500 different numbers. no, they cant.
In the researcher world, it's all about publishing, publishing, publishing. 90% of the papers is crap, and at leat 75% of the conferences is crap. People fake results, publish even before they have the actual results, only to get noticed. I'm in the middle of it, and I sometimes feel so ashamed by the quality of what I'm forced to publish that I feel like stepping out.
Someone hasn't been paying attention for the past 30 years. Reaganomics doesn't work. Why it doesn't work is an academic question, but simple reality is that it has been disastrous for this country.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Because an economy is a lot like an ecosystem. You eliminate the regulators (like, say the predators), in an ecosystem and you get populations booms followed by population collapse when the resources are depleted. Sometimes to extinction. Regulation is good in that it prevents this boom and bust scenario. Guess what the economic system advocated by conventional economists looks like? Boom and bust the whole length. The periods of stability in between have usually come as governments start enforcing regulations after a pariticularly boom and bust event has left a good part of the population in hardship. Then over time people forget. Little by little regulations are dropped, and of course so arrives a period of apparent prosperity (the boom phase) during which we are lured into dropping more and more regulations because obviously regulations are hampering this prosperity. Of course, it can't last. Without the moderation provided by regulation we enter this boom phase, that once all the suckers at the bottom of this pyramidal scheme have contributed can only end in a bust. Then we start talking of regulation again (which is needed).
Until we get rid of the models that advocate the "deregulate" point of view, we have no chance of getting out of this history of boom and bust. Current economic models encourage waste (we've dilapidated in a couple of generations all the energy wealth stored up over millions of years). That's hardly "economic" if it's wasteful. Boom and bust cycles, and chronic waste are a sure proof that accepted economic models are broken.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Most U.S. conservatives are strong proponents of fewer regulations, effectively enforced.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There will also be some bias in terms of what makes a citation "superfluous." A good editor is concerned about insuring that the submitter's statements are accurate and well-sourced. On good legal journals, editors actually go and look at every cited source (hundreds per article) to see if it contains the proposition it is cited for. When a journal is well-sourced, it is more reliable as a source for practitioners and as a research tool for academics, as well as being a better stepping-off point for further research. Forcing an author to show that his or her statements are actually accurate can be useful. More junior faculty obviously get away with less blustering because their reputations are not already built, and journals have an interest in getting people who are better-known in the field.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
It's discussing *superfluous* citations, not irrelevant ones. The authors are the ones deciding if they are superfluous. Authors will always think that having to add a citation is superfluous. That doesn't mean that they should be able to ramble on for a forty page paper with less than an absolute minimum of, say, 120 footnotes. Is it possible that the paper is perfectly correct without them? Sure. But if I'm putting a journal's name on them, and I'm responsible for the journal's reputation, I'd like them to be more reliable than a note someone wrote on the back of a napkin.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
What do you have against the axioms? Fuck you.
In my field, I usually end up struggling prior to submission to cut references, because many of the journals I submit to have limits on the numbers of citations. Often, this means citing a review rather than the primary literature (because one review can take the place of multiple primary papers), or citing a recent work using the most current methods and dropping citations of the earlier ground-breaking work in the field
I am an author and an editor of a journal that could use a higher impact factor to get noticed. But I have never been "encouraged" to add a reference that was not clearly missing (there have been one or two of those, due to inadequate research on my part), and as an editor I have never asked for additional references except in cases where there was clearly prior work that the authors should have been aware of and should have cited, usually because the missing references actually showed the results the authors were claiming as new contributions. So I think this is a case of extreme self-selection, and perhaps a particular field or journal where some practices need to be examined. I just don't see it in Computer Science, Economics, or related fields where I read and publish.
Got any data to back that up?
I would agree that half-assed libertarianism probably doesn't work. I disagree that a system as complex as human society can ever be summed up into a "simple reality".
Axioms are unproven, that's what I have against them.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I disagree completely. The regulators are most definitely NOT part of the ecosystem. They're like park officials who prevent tiny forest fires because it is unsightly to tourists - and then a few years later we have mega, uncontrollable fires. This is analogous to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac trying to increase home ownership and then ... oops we have a problem.
Regulators will never reduce or eliminate boom and bust, that is the socialist fantasy that the world can be regulated to perfection.
I have bad news for you ... dig deep enough, and you find out all the other 'sciences' suffer from exactly the same problems.
In all sciences, reviewers will often ask authors to cite additional papers and provide some commentary on them. [How do your results differ?] Whether the papers are relevant is difficult to answer.
I have been on both sides of this. As a reviewer, I have often asked that additional papers be cited, sometimes my own. After all, I wouldn't be a reviewer if I didn't have some expertise. As an author, usually I agree the additional citations are relevant. Even I don't think so, I 'suck it up' in order to get my paper published. I'm sure the authors of the papers I reviewed sometimes felt the same way.
Welcome to peer-review.
So, in which regulated economy there was no boom-bust cycle ? Even the Communist economies in Eastern Europe had those because they were connected to the world market, but when the last one came the whose system crashed instead of only some companies crashing.
The "boom-bust cycle" is given exaggerated importance: the variations were, for the last 200 years and with very few exceptions, about 7 percent but the overall curve was ascending.
Criticizing mathematics for relying on axioms is like criticizing science for relying on hypotheses.
Mathematics is the study of how logical structures behave. This involves creating a system by "making up" different rules, and then investigating the logical consequences of the ruleset you defined. This is simply how the "mathematical method" works.
While your second claim is fine, the parallel in your first is not.
A hypothesis is a thing we wish to discover the truth of. An axiom is a thing we accept on faith before investigating the 'truth' of other things. If mathematicians want to be taken seriously, they need to acknowledge that they are no better than religious philosophers debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin based on the truth of the bible.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Yeah, you're right, us social and behavior scientists are just running a huge con on the world and we deserve your derision. Why stop here? Soft sciences like biology are pretty much bunk too. I mean, what the hell? When has a biologist ever been able to tell you, mathematically, how a giraffe is going to act or how a protein will interact with a peptide? Pure crap.
More to your point, when has anyone in social science done anything for the advancement of the species? Never.
So, good show sir. You have sussed our little game and I hope you're happy with what you've done. Of course, us social science types do get pretty involved with biochemists and the like, but I'm sure that won't put you off your morning coffee or cause you to question that aerosol slowly issuing from the air conditioning duct above your head.
If you'll pardon me, I'm going to go tent my fingers and stroke my long haired cat.