Slashdot Mirror
Elite Group of Researchers Rule Scientific Publishing
sciencehabit writes Publishing is one of the most ballyhooed metrics of scientific careers, and every researcher hates to have a gap in that part of his or her CV. Here's some consolation: A new study finds that very few scientists—fewer than 1%—manage to publish a paper every year. But these 150,608 scientists dominate the research journals, having their names on 41% of all papers. Among the most highly cited work, this elite group can be found among the co-authors of 87% of papers. Students, meanwhile, may spend years on research that yields only one or a few papers. "[I]n these cases, the research system may be exploiting the work of millions of young scientists," the authors conclude.
1% of scientists publish more papers that the other 99%.
...and a negative one at that.
Could it ever possibly be that these scientists who "dominate" the scientific publishing are actually worthy of such a thing?
You know, like smart and dedicated workers earning larger salaries.
What do these complainers want, "fairness" instead of competition?
Bleh!
And since when does "consensus" mean anything in science?
Well, outside of subjects where it's heresy to even attempt to falsify any claims, anyway...
.... “In many disciplines, doctoral students may be enrolled in high numbers, offering a cheap workforce,” ....
Well, yeah.
College is expensive. You need experience.
And in the US, I wonder how many are foreign who are stuck in those positions.
And a cheap workforce flies in the face of there being a shortage of scientists.
It's increasingly the job of professors at research universities in the sciences to be more of a "research manager" than a "researcher". They're expected to have a big lab of 5-15 students and postdocs, and to bring in enough grant funding to pay for this lab. The ones who are successful at this lab-head game bring in a bunch of money, have a large lab, and as a result oversee a lot of work that comes out of that lab, most of which has them as a co-author. Individual researchers without a team can't really compete against that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"[I]n these cases, the research system may be exploiting the work of millions of young scientists," the authors conclude.
"May be"? Is this seriously supposed to be open to doubt?
What's the problem with being good at what you do? So there are 1% of researchers who are really fucking good at what they do. They aren't just good, they are REALLY FUCKING GOOD. They are top 1% good. They are THE BEST IN THE WORLD. So why should we be surprised that they have such an impact?
It's the same in all sorts of fields. Like look at the C programmers who work on the Linux kernel. They probably make up way less than 1% of all C programmers, never mind all programmers. Yet their contribution is ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE! They punch way way way above their weight. Thanks to them the world goes round each and every day!
It's even the same in sports! Just look at how a player like Michael Jordan can not only just lead his team, but he can single-handedly dominate an ENTIRE LEAGUE! Sonofabitch, just look at what happened today at the World Cup. Germany absolutely dominated that South American team and destroyed them 1-0. What should Germany have done, pretended they aren't the BEST FOOTBALL CLUB in the world and allowed the South Americans to win? Absolutely not! THE BEST NEED TO EXCEL! That is just now nature works!
Or just look at music. Look at Michael Jackson. He is just one musician among many, but he RULED THE WORLD!
What are these guys supposed to do? Lower themselves to the level of the other 99%? No, they shouldn't do that. They're damn good, so they should be the top 1% and they should give a TOP 1% EFFORT! If that means dominating the field, then so be it. We aren't playing games here. This isn't kindergarten where everybody needs to feel good. This is about DOING THE BEST WORK and if these guys and gals can do it, then let them. Let them be THE DOMINATORS!
1% Elitism is EVERYWHERE.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Why? It would take only one scientist to falsify AGW. All we need now is the evidence.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Junior guys in [field] aren't as well known as senior guys and do most of the grunt work.
Film at 11.
Pretty much there are a ton of old famous researchers who teach classes and assign papers that have the students solve problems and come up with interesting topics, the best of which are hand picked by the professor and basically stolen.
Grad students and undergrads alike are turning into a new kind of intellectual slavery.
A real scientist is best described by R. Dawkins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWGAg9iGPLQ&list=PLKSmsr0k7vdmfoyf7Jjm_LaaRKZXx0Ad1#t=480
I did met some. None will never hear from them.
Can't believe this is considered news. Society is obviously becoming stupider.
John Ionnadinis is one of the better publishing scientists who critiques science.
Are those papers any good or are they just banging out crap in a perverse game of "lets boost the testing metric while ignoring actual quality"?
They took a publications database between 1996 and 2011, which contains about 15,000,000 authors.
There they found only 150,000 published every of those years.
Of course not all of those 15 million have been working in research for 16 years. Most graduate/PhD students are in research for 5 years and then they need to find another job.
Actually most people at my company were author or co-author of a paper at some point, and we only published because of some grants that required it.
So if you take out the people who really only have a couple of publications, or published for a small period of time, the picture will be completely different.
Take into account that you need people who's career actually span the 1996-2011 period (which filters out probably like 30% of people genuinely having a successfull academic career), and they actually paint a realistic picture of who the profs are or research leads.
I'm surprised the "dominating group" is that large. There aren't a ton of _senior_ scientist out there (i.e. professors or researchers with the funding for graduate students and postdocs), and those are the people whose names appear most frequently. A senior scientist will probably have been doing research for years, have lots of projects going on at once, have many students and postdocs, have a number of collaborators, and the senior scientist's name will go on every paper produced by that group (even if it's as a middle author -- which means next to nothing). New guys will often want to collaborate with the big names, which means the big names get on even more papers. If you're working on your own (i.e. you don't have the funding to hire others), then you won't publish as frequently.
What did you expect? Why is this an issue?
Sincerely,
A graduate student who has been working on a project for two years (and who should be working on a paper)
Lmfao. Visit any fucking school and you'll see there's no 'maybe' about it.
1% Elitism is EVERYWHERE.
Ahem. It's called corruption. Get your shit straight.
No wonder it's taken a dominant position.
Probably every student will have the name of their professor on their paper. And almost every researcher will have the name of their manager or even the name of the director of their research institute on their paper. At least this is how it was while I was working at a research institute. The bosses will almost every time end up getting named as co-authors on every publication.
On the other hand, the bosses will have to study and approve so many research papers that they will be short on time to write their own papers. Getting named as co-author will be their consolation in return.
Knowing that you could be putting in 70-80 hours a week, and potentially stumble across some major discovery (imagine: cure a kind of cancer discovery). That discovery would be published by your boss, who, adding to his life's work, would cumulatively take most of the public credit for the work. Meanwhile, it doesn't matter if you had some amazing insight or designed the actual experiment to solve the problem.
Look at Nobel laureates and their age and their contributions. How many nameless people enabled them to win that award?
All you can hope for is that you publish a couple papers in top journals that will enable to you to get a solid job in industry, or jump onto the tenure track treadmill, so that one day you can be in a position of exploiting others' work and creativity, potentially in a field completely unrelated to your PhD.
The young have no power to change, and the old have no reason to give up their advantageous position.
99% of review committees for conferences and editorial boards on journals are made up of that 1% of elite scientists. So the guys who decide which papers get published and which get crumpled and tossed into the bin are from the one who, by the way, do most of the publishing.
Having been in research for 15+ years, everyone knows that it's one big collusion of people promoting each other and excluding the rest. *Everyone* knows this. If a researcher pretends not to understand this or dismisses it then he's bullshitting you. Yes. It is depressing. Oh, and while I was actively publishing I was in the 1%...
Over the last 30 some years Science Magazine, the journals of the American Meteorological Society and the journals of the American Geophysical Union have had their editorial processes corrupted and usurped by Cartels who disparately want to control the content of papers published for gain of money (including Federal grants) and prestige (including inclusion to the Editorial Boards where they can have the greatest of control to achieve their Ponzi schemes).
Wasn't this the point of cosmos? to get more of these exploitable kids into the system?
(a) yes, sort of.
but
(b) have the researchers ever met a typical graduate student?
Elite scientists? In that 1% group we will find heads of labs that sign the papers of any of their underlying. They also file patents and have stocks in statups. This kind of "elite" is the parasite kind.
Now I find no way to find in publication data who are the really exceptional scientists. We would have to look at paper quality to tell that.
"[C]limate change realist" hahaha, you're calling people who claim that a world-wide cabal of scientists are in a conspiracy to keep the "real truth" about global warming a secret "realists"? Best joke I've heard all week!
you talk as if the problem in TFA is a funding issue...
there needs to be more public funding of research for sure, and bigger budgets for state universities...yes all true
however, you're giving these professors in TFA a free pass and blameshifting
TFA is about **THE TOP PUBLISHERS** not just the highest PhD in each department...
to call this a funding issue is to miss the root cause: the professors themselves
it's out of control in academia...really it is become awful...narcissistic tenured prof's staying on 20 years past when they should have retired to make room for new younger talent
Thank you Dave Raggett
I (BSc) was assisting a PhD student on a project, a project the student was having difficulty with and became very demotivated. Although his supervisor was doing all he could to keep the research going (including bringing me onboard to help), eventually the PhD candidate pulled out. The end result, a paper has been published with my name and his supervisor's name on it, because we ended up finishing the study. So yeah, I can see how his supervisor having yet another paper with his name on it published might seem like the 1%, but reality is, the supervisor had the work ethic to finish off the study and have it published when the student did not.
This is why I consider "science" a scam and things like evolution, global warming and all that other horse shit to be false. I can see and understand the world with my own eyes. I don't need egg heads and leftist academics to tell me how the world works.
I guess our problem is that we haven't been able to accurately discern between *publishing* and *publishing something useful*. We've built an economy based on how many papers you can shove through the system, without regard to their quality. Build a system with certain incentives, and you'll get fairly predictable outcomes.
It seems like it would take some pretty severe sanctions, and perhaps bounties for those who exposed fraud, before it will really stop.
You should try a new scam. Anti-Semitism is pretty old hat, it goes back to the Pharaohs. You have to be kind of stupid to engage in it.
I had a conversation about this with a guy at work 2 days before this article was posted. With the professor I had this was not the case, however some of the other professors at my school had this kind of attitude. Most professors\scientists write grants and spend most of their time doing that and the students do most of the work, as long as the students get credit on the paper for it and get paid (cash or stipend), it doesn't matter. If your a student and not getting paid, find something else to do. I have a problem with academics because it seems like its becoming more of a dog and pony show, when it should be doing research that benefits society Some of the scientists don't even review the paper and have their buddies slap there name on it, they get credit for something that they didn't do. People more and more these days want to get something and not do the work. Finance people want to get money regardless of the means or if their investing in actual companies. Scientists want to be recognized for work they didn't do. Even the guy at the local fast food joint wants better pay without getting a better education and\or a better job. Don't even get me started on politicians...
Most of these 'researchers' who get their names on every paper are actually the managers who don't have a clue about the actual research. Their name is only there because they force the real researchers to include it in the papers. Been there, done that, quit the job.
At the place where I work, there are thousands of engineers, but only a small percentage ever publish books. The others are...you know...working as engineers.
Grant money is given preferably to teams that already publish a lot. Even "starting grants" in the EU require a single principal investigator (PI) with a lot of well-cited publication under their belt. This can only be achieved if the PI has done their initial research in a well-heeled lab, with a well-known head of the lab who is well-connected, and so on. This encourages a pyramidal structure with a lot of grunt students at the bottom, supervised by post-docs, supervised by assistant professors, and so on. Success encourages visibility, which encourages grants, which ensures money, which ensures good grunt students can be hired, and so on.
This is not the only possible successful structure, but one of the most common. A single researcher, however brilliant, cannot usually keep up with the outpouring of landmark papers the pyramidal structure can achieve. On the other hand, if everybody does their job, meritocracy in the pyramidal structure ensures that the best grunt students get promoted to post docs, and so on, usually in a different pyramidal structure.
The big drawback of the pyramidal structure is that the prof at the top usually doesn't know exactly what is going on at the bottom, even though they put their name on most of the papers that the structure produces.
Disclaimer: I'm a tenured prof. I do have a reasonable number of students, but I work with them directly. All my students are co-supervised with at least one other prof. Occasionally I do have a few post-docs but the structure is always collaborative. This is not the standard but this works well enough also as long as there isn't any ego-driven fights in the lab. This means choosing your collaborators well. I've made a few mistakes, but so far so good.
When I was a PHD student all my papers also had my supervisor as main author even though he did nothing more than read the paper and come up with a few suggestion like "write a bit more here" or "you need to make this part more clear". (Yes, I am pretty bitter, this is not the way it is supposed to be.)
This is "news" only to people who don't have a clue how research works - and usually the ones setting the publication criteria - like "you have to publish 2 journal papers per year" for an assistant professor (fresh post-doc or a PhD student), along with all the teaching load, of course. I was teaching 10 different courses (!) one semester and was still expected to actually do research half of my time and to publish those 2 journal papers.
Never mind that shepherding a journal paper through the review process and publication takes a year or two on average alone, plus you have to actually have something to publish to begin with. Even conference papers can take 6 months to publish and you must attend them as well (but nobody wants to pay for that!).
The prolific "publishers" are mostly professors that are heads of labs. They are not actually doing any of the work themselves. It is the young PhD students and post-docs who are slaving away in the lab, writing the papers and then put the name of the prof on the paper as a coauthor. It is a very common practice, basically giving a nod to the prof for paying their salary and letting them graduate. If you have a large lab with 20 PhDs who write 1-2 papers a year, that's alone 40 papers for the prof's CV annually. Then you get invited to contribute to various book chapters (again PhD students write that), you get invited lectures and what not - all that counts as publications.
The young researchers have absolutely no chance to break through in such competition where the number of publications is a criteria. You can have two very good papers but when you apply for an academic job, you have no chance against a guy with 40+ (no matter that most of them are the same thing publishes under different names or it isn't really their work). Unfortunately, that often leads to BS publications - like doing few minor changes and publishing the same work several times in different venues, publishing obvious, non-interesting "results" in minor, often in-house workshops or conferences, in the worse cases even scientific fraud and various misconduct - all for the sake of getting that number of publications up. It is only your job and chance for tenure that is at stake.
I have left university pretty much because of this - with no/not enough publications no chance to get a permanent position, but no chance to get those papers published if all you are doing is teaching teaching and more teaching (even though I love teaching). And when not teaching you are doing paperwork and trying to justify your own existence to various clueless bureaucrats every few months so that they don't cut your funding again. That's not exactly a situation where you can do research.
The problem is it is hard to distinguish the field leaders who direct their students from the ones who hire a bunch of non-English speakers who need to publish in English, but can't write comprehensibly, and then treat them like low-paid long-hours lab-techs. Lots of data, none of the career potential.
Also hard to distinguish the ones who do what they are supposed to do (show their grad students how to write and submit papers, introduce them to other leaders) from the ones who take credit and then dump on their juniors. The good ones have to compete with the people they graduate later, and at least some of those people will be brighter than they are.
You have to consider that even the least intelligent people with science phds and postdocs are still pretty bright. And the good ones who publish the most are normally working or schmoozing most of their waking life, far more than the innovators in most companies. Some labs are publishing factories where loads of postdocs churn out loads of papers each. The person running the lab has a significant impact.
I don't think this is a case where you just turf all these profs for putting out too many papers. The biggest issue is that there aren't enough jobs for current students so a lot of the best people burn out and leave. There is not much hope of making money before about 45 in most fields due to the number of years of study required. Outcompeting really bright people for 25 adult years and then getting stuck behind a bunch of tenured guys with dropping government funding sucks.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
i have a PhD and some halfway decent papers, and this has been obvious to me since first year grad school
btw
when will someone else realize that most, indeed almost all, of the "peer reviewed" scientific literature is pretty much worthless ?
PPS: MI sen T Cochran has been battling his teaparty rival. TC say that there was very little if any fraud in teh recent MI runoff
think this will have the slightest impact on all those republicons who think there is massive voting faud ?
you can stop laughing now
A word of advice: Whenever someone uses the word "realist" in a political sense, your safest assumption to make is that they are intentionally lying to you. Realist is a weasel word to avoid having to explain oneself.
So, I wonder how much information is shared between scientists, peer reviewed, and never submitted to a journal? If you know the ipython notebook that is a way to do what people used to do, correspond via mail. now via web-page or e-mail. You can distribute results along with the data that were used and the programs that processed it, how your data got reduced, how the images were drafted. You guys know about this. Is the paper journal and the publishing paywalls a thing of the past?
Hey you there! In the top 1% of /. UIDs! Stop doing that!
Briefly in the early 70s edited a minor journat in anthropology based at a major museum the papers we were submitted weren't worth the paper they were written on. It sort of clued me in to how got the job n the first place. You couldn't get a grad assistant to do it.
But the number they quote is more like 30% of all scientists.
Your still replying to your own anonymous posts? Stop acting like we don't know you were the fucker flooding the comments with your hostfile apk crap.