Slashdot Mirror
How Many Scientists Does It Take To Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands
An anonymous reader writes: The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the current spike in number of contributors cedited in scientific journals. The problem is highlighted by a recent physics paper which credits 5,154 researchers. The journal reports: "In fact, there has been a notable spike since 2009 in the number of technical reports whose author counts exceeded 1,000 people, according to the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which analyzed citation data. In the ever-expanding universe of credit where credit is apparently due, the practice has become so widespread that some scientists now joke that they measure their collaborators in bulk—by the 'kilo-author.'"
How many editors does it take to spell-check TFS?
Yes, there's a trend going upwards but there are only 1,400 papers with 50 or more authors. In 2009 about 1 million biomedical papers were published. So if we make the unlikely assumption that all the high author number papers are biomedical, that means that a whopping ~0.15% of the papers published each year have more than 50 authors. Not exactly a big deal.
soylentnews.org
Infinite monkey theorem in popular culture
Considering the classic trend to have lots of people do the work for you while taking all the credit and delaying their graduation from grad school as long as possible, it's probably better this way.
But the question is actually if it makes sense to have many authors on a paper. If you have 10 or more it should already raise a warning flag.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Depends on the field. On genetics paper, you could easily have:
* The principle investigator and whoever in their lab obtained/prepared the samples.
* The lab that performed the sequencing, sometimes even in another institution, with plenty of people who might have handled the samples/nurse-maided the machines at some point, plus whoever leads that lab.
* The bioinformatics teams that processed the data, including checking for quality control and early analysis.
* In-depth analysis from a different team in the first lab, or a completely new team, plus the lab leader.
* Follow-up sequencing or functional work, with their own respective teams.
* The writing team for the paper, plus whatever names the funding was attached to, who need name-checking.
All that for what could easily be an investigation of a handful of samples.
I think the underlying cause is that the low-hanging fruit of hard science - that which is amenable to a small lab group working by itself - has largely already been harvested.
More clickbait. The article in question is built on work done at teh ATLAS collaboration and the CMS collaboration, two of the biggest physics experiments around. Unsurprising that there are so many authors (they need to reference everyone who worked on the project).
Article reference info (since professional media shops are no longer able to do the minimal leg work required):
Title: "Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at s=7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments"
Published: Physical review Letters
I find a greater red flag to be a large number of reference sources, without specific denotations of which data is pulled from which source, making it impossible for the reader to establish context in how the source data was established and therefore if it is properly employed. But that is a stray from the topic at hand.
References;
1. Me
When everyone has been credited on dozens or hundreds of scientific papers it dilutes the perceived value of the average researchers involvement in each paper on which they claim credit. In the competitive worlds of grant application and academic positions, this means you have to be more worried about getting credit on as many studies as possible than about actually doing meaningful research on a single issue in order to make it through the initial review/HR screening process.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
But the question is actually if it makes sense to have many authors on a paper. If you have 10 or more it should already raise a warning flag.
One of the examples they highlight is CERN, where thousands of researchers do indeed contribute. Since the current way of assigning credit in academic circles is to put people on a paper, it's hard to see what else can be done. Yes, it's a bit weird but it happens very rarely. I don't see what the "warning flag" is being raised in aid of. There's no reason to think the science is worse in a large author count paper. If I was interviewing someone with only authorship in high author count papers then I'd ask the the appropriate questions. Then again, I'd likely ask those questions anyway. I've interviewed first authors (of a paper with under 5 authors) who couldn't explain the analyses described in the article. There are warning flags, but the number of authors likely isn't one of them.
soylentnews.org
One person writes pretty much the entire paper while one or two other people might actually give some insightful comments or other significant contributions.
The Human Genome Project, assembling work from thousands of researchers, developers, and technicians worldwide had hundreds of authors.
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
It can make sense in such a large project to list as many of the contributors as possible.
Scientists have played pranks with co-author names. The famous Alpha-Beta-Gamma paper comes to mind. Low temp physicist Hetherington had included his dog as a co-author so that he could use "we" in the paper.
The spoof paper authored by S Candlestickmaker done by a student of S Chandrashekar was very famous. The student later lamented that spoof paper was his best known contribution to science than his PhD or his entire research career. It is telling I remember S Candlestickmaker but not the student's name.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So we're not supposed to publish our work if it took more than 10 people to do it?
But are all of those authors, and not data contributors?
Think of it a bit like movie credits. A small indie production probably only has a few people involved. A big blockbuster (like the Human Genome Project) easily has thousands of people making meaningful contributions. The size of the credits should match accordingly.
It is common practice for more renowned professors to include grad students, PhD's in the lab etc on papers just to get their names out there. Since your science worth is often based on the number of papers on your resume, it's a great way of starting a career by having your professor include your name in grad school and beyond. I've seen papers with 20+ names on it where most of them, I know for a fact, have done practically nothing for the paper.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Big reports like the IPCC assessment reports compile hundreds or thousands of papers. In that context, it makes sense to cite thousands of authors. It's also possible that massive efforts requiring collaboration on such a scale like analyzing LHC data or sequencing a genome might actually involve hundreds or thousands of people making significant contributions to the work. I don't really see that as being the real issue with citations.
The real issue is the abuse of the peer review and funding proposal review processes and how citations play into that. It's often possible to personally identify an anonymous critical reviewer of a manuscript because they will insist you cite several of their own papers, but not those written by others. It's an abuse of the process because it uses the peer review process to artificially inflate how often your own work has been cited relative to others. Also, in many instances, there's a limit on the length of funding proposals, but those limits don't include references. That's because proposal authors are generally obliged to cite as much work as possible. Reviewers frequently look at how often their papers have been cited, and that significantly influences how they review the proposal. While some citations are essential to demonstrate an understanding or prior work and the scientific merit of proposed or completed work, review of funding proposals and journal manuscripts should be based on scientific merit and not how often a particular reviewer has been cited.
Often the most difficult part of writing a journal manuscript or a funding proposal is being thorough and finding as many papers as possible to cite. While it is absolutely necessary to cite prior work, it has gone too far where citations aren't simply to justify otherwise disputable statements or credit novel prior work. Also, there ought to be a point when something is so ubiquitously understood in science that it's essentially common knowledge and need not be cited any longer, but this is often not the case.
But are all of those authors, and not data contributors?
Collecting the data is the actual work. Any idiot with a computer can make the analysis. And draw the wrong conclusions from that.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Didn't read the article, but CERN is the first thing that popped into my head when I read the summary/title.
More clickbait. The article in question is built on work done at teh ATLAS collaboration and the CMS collaboration, two of the biggest physics experiments around.
You're confusing the article with the example. Work done at the ATLAS collaboration was one of the examples given of massively-multiple-author science papers. It's not "the article".
The interesting part of the article is the graph.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Writing papers by the dump truck load. It's become the religion of science. It's all bullshit.
Search science papers online, find "I. Abstract" to be a very prolific author with expertise in practically all scientific fields. A true renaissance man (or woman, or whatever).
It typically works the other way. The grad student writes the paper and his adviser wants his name included because he "advised".
It typically works the other way. The grad student writes the paper and his adviser wants his name included because he brought in the grant money that paid for the research.
Fixed that for you.
Why would they give you the exact denotations when all you're going to do is try to find something wrong with it?
It is common practice for more renowned professors to include grad students, PhD's in the lab etc on papers just to get their names out there.
It is far more common for the grad students to be included because they did the actual work, and the "renowned professor" is a free loader who didn't even check the data, and may not have even read the paper.
It is common practice for grad students to include more renowned professors in the lab etc on papers out of respect of their funding. Since your worth as a Primary Investigator (grant holder) is based on the number of papers on your resume, It is the only way of having a career. I've seen papers with 20+ PH.Ds on it where most of them, I know for a fact, have done practically nothing for the paper.
I needed to fix that for you. In general a well funded lab is so busy the PIs do almost nothing buy advise and review to make sure the grant work stays on progress. In reality Grads and Post Docs do 90% of the work in hopes of one day moving to a career in management aka a PI position. I've never meet a PI that has time to work the day to day minutia of science discovery in fact they often lament if they wanted to keep doing science they would have never started a lab.
Momento Mori
Collecting the data is the actual work.
Maybe so, but that's not what an author does.
Perhaps there needs to be a better way to formalize "acknowledgements", which used to be (and still is in some fields) the way you recognize the folks who helped, but who didn't actually do the "writing" or the "final analysis".
There is no way that 1000 people actually wrote the paper. What it really is, normally, is 3 or 4 "wrote", and 997 contributed to the published work in some way.
However, the bibliographic databases, and the "cite counters" and "CV length measurement metrics" don't care about acknowledgement, they care about "author".
We are in the age of big science. The papers with enormous author lists are often the ones dealing with terabytes of data - think supercolliders and the like - so indeed here are huge numbers of people working on it. This is not the great conspiracy that "failure machine" samzenpus is trying to portray it as here. Rather, the fact of the matter is that very little science is done by individuals any more; the big questions we seek to answer now require more resources and time than what an individual can pull together.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It is far more common for the grad students to be included because they did the actual work, and the "renowned professor" is a free loader who didn't even check the data, and may not have even read the paper.
I once reviewed a paper with three authors, one of whom is a professor and actually pretty damned good in the field. The two others were grad students. It was a computer science paper where they first proved some theorems and then built the rest on applications of the theorems. However, one of the theorems was obviously false. Equally obviously I don't want to write here what exactly it was, but it was on the level of "Theorem: every prime number is odd" and the proof boiled down to: "it is clear that this theorem has to be true".
I recommended rejection because of the theorem and apparently the other reviewers agreed and it was rejected. Then at the conference the professor wondered why their other paper had not been accepted. It was quite clear to me that he hadn't even looked at the paper before it was submitted, there's no way that a guy as bright as him wouldn't have noticed the theorem that wasn't .
But the question is actually if it makes sense to have many authors on a paper. If you have 10 or more it should already raise a warning flag.
There's probably not much of a reason to view most of these as red flags. In addition to projects like CERN, biomedical (as mentioned elsewhere) and larger interdisciplinary research projects may also tend to follow this model to a degree. I work for a USDA funded project tackling a wicked problem that has over 50 PIs and probably 3-4 times that in graduate students and staff. Our group has published multiple works with more than 10 authors and each has contributed legitimately to the research design and/or the writing.
principal, not principle, dumbnuts.
naming a 1000 authors with email and affiliation takes about 2-3 pages. not sure that whatever is in the paper is actually worth being written about, as it can hardly be something unique.
My wife recently published 4 papers, on which there are 5-8 authors each. Some, if not most of the "authors" did nothing to contribute to the papers. Some of them haven't probably even read the abstract.
Some of them just wanted to get their names on the papers "because", and the professor (with the funding) basically said "best not to offend them."
The conclusion I've come to is that the first few names + the last one have done work on/for the paper. The rest the names seem to be there because have some relation to the faculty/whatever, and have demanded their names be on the paper.
Thank you, "failure machine" samzenpus. I was wondering how long you would make it this week before touting the anti-science agenda. It would certainly be terrible if people on slashdot had an appreciation for how big science works in the 21st century, it is great that they can count on people like you to blindly demonize it instead.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Absolutely agree that it's much ado about nothing. AND bad statistics ! CERN as an example is a lot of nonsense... it's a HUGE project with a HUGE population of PhD's, grad students, undergrads, managers, technicians, and everybody else. All working towards a common goal. And the science developed by those thousands of authors is an enormous collaboration, enabled by ... yeah, you guessed it, the World Wide Web. Which was INVENTED at CERN to enable... Collaboration.
WSJ, you look like a bunch of idiots. Stick to talking about stocks and rich people stuff. You suck at science.
But the question is actually if it makes sense to have many authors on a paper. If you have 10 or more it should already raise a warning flag.
Root cause analysis. Why is the paper being written in the first place.
I would not put obfuscation represented by putting thousands of authors on policy-manipulating research papers as something beyond reproach when trying to secure profits.
Let's not pretend we've never heard of a lobbyist before, or why they exist.
Yes, there's a trend going upwards but there are only 1,400 papers with 50 or more authors. In 2009 about 1 million biomedical papers were published. So if we make the unlikely assumption that all the high author number papers are biomedical, that means that a whopping ~0.15% of the papers published each year have more than 50 authors. Not exactly a big deal.
Not exactly a big deal?
Guess that depends on just how much of that ~0.15% is used to drive change and affect policy for millions of citizens.
Don't dismiss what these papers are used for. We're not exactly gathering thousands of minds together to document how to build a lemonade stand.
Copy from many == research.
Science today is judged by two metrics: papers published and students graduated.
It's important to actually understand that statement if you want to understand some of the quirks and problems with scientific culture.
You do not get credit for projects, advancements, talks, transition to industry, programs, results, etc. The government granting agencies only track papers published and students graduated when comparing different granting offices. Put another way, the government internally sets funding targets for each sub-field based on papers published and students graduated. Thus only papers published and students graduated are meaningful to science (again, not results, but papers).
Papers and # of PhDs became the currency of science, and are used to judge everything from the readiness of a student to graduate to the differential societal contribution of different scientific fields.
This has led to a situation where if you want to graduate students in fields like particle physics, you need to include them on the very rare papers that come out. Failing to graduate students would lead to a decrease in funding. For a student to get "credit" for working at CERN or NASA, that student needs to be on a paper. It's as simple as that.
"The conclusion I've come to is that the first few names + the last one have done work on/for the paper"
You realize it's often in alphabetical order, right?
Not exactly a big deal?
Guess that depends on just how much of that ~0.15% is used to drive change and affect policy for millions of citizens.
Don't dismiss what these papers are used for. We're not exactly gathering thousands of minds together to document how to build a lemonade stand.
I think you're talking about the impact of big science on society and funding. This is an interesting question but it's a different one to how many authors are on the papers, which is what the article is about. The article implies that we're entering an era where huge multi-author papers are common. This isn't so because the phenomenon they are describing accounts of a small fraction of a percent of all published papers. The phenomenon they are describing is not a big deal. The content of the science itself (and the money it commands) is a different issue.
soylentnews.org
It is common practice for more renowned professors to include grad students, PhD's in the lab etc on papers just to get their names out there. Since your science worth is often based on the number of papers on your resume, it's a great way of starting a career by having your professor include your name in grad school and beyond. I've seen papers with 20+ names on it where most of them, I know for a fact, have done practically nothing for the paper.
Common practice or not, those people don't belong in the list. It demeans the value of those that actually did work on the paper.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
There is the author of the work, and the author of the paper, and no way to really distinguish them other than tradition/policy within fields and groups. Considering that the results, including data and plots, are a big part of the paper, the people who created that data can be argued to be authors as much as those that summarized the procedures.
Well, if you want to call only the creators of actual material authors, then the data collectors should be the authors, and the people who just rearrange and clean up their results and procedures editors...
There have been efforts underway to standardize acknowledgement of data that came from other scientists. Most of us in the field have been calling the concept 'data citation' for a while (but it also refers to the act of linking, plus the string of text in the paper ... so it's a bit of a polysemous term at this point).
The basic idea is that for each grouping of data (I won't get into trying to define what a 'data set' is) that's being released, the group that's doing the release puts out a web page of information describing the data.
It would have the DataCite fields to specify how the data should be listed in the reference section of your paper, plus the w3c DCATterms to explain how to obtain the data. The DataCite schema allows you to acknowledge many different roles for people, allowing you to more clearly describe what different people's contributions were ... instead of just a long list of people, you'd have something more like movie credits.
This would solve much of the super collider issues, as you'd separately acknowledge the people who obtained & processed the data, who might have had no hand in the specific research that the paper describes. In my opinion, the authors should be people who agree with the findings that are being presented -- the folks who made the data should be acknowledged, but if they've had no chance to review the research that's being published (or have no ability to understand the researcher), they should not be listed as an author.
If you're interested in the topic, here are a few links that might be of interest:
If you're interested in participating in these efforts, either find a group in your research area, or for wider efforts, the Research Data Alliance's Data Citation Work Group.
I should also mention that there are similar efforts going on with scientific software. I've participating in some workshops (eg, RENCI's on data & software), but I'm not as active in that field. Some RDA have discussed starting up a group on software issues, but I think they'll be focusing more on Software Carpentry issues; for software citation I'd suggest contacting the Software Sustainability Institute.
ps. I've been included as a 'co-author' on papers where I've never had a chance to review the paper first. I think that all journals should check with all listed authors if they approve of the paper. (I've also peer reviewed a paper that had so many grammar errors in it that I suspect that none of the co-authors (most were native english speakers) had reviewed it) ... and it didn't reference the co-authors' earlier related articles). PeerJ does this and it also requi
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This is the way it worked when I was in biomedical research 20 years ago. The grad student or post doc who did the work and wrote the paper got to be second author. The principle investigator with the grant got to be first author or last author, depending on the lab or paper. There's a whole cultural system for deciding the order of authors on papers, with varying collaborators getting credit.
In the papers I was involved with the P.I. of the lab that let us have some monoclonal antibody they had developed got to be an author, as did the chemist who synthesized a custom vitamin A derivative for the project. So did the PhD who started the project years ago as a grad student, but hadn't been involved in a dozen years. The lab assistant who did most of the work for the project might have gotten an acknowledgement.
This has been my experience as well - dating back to the late 80's. A principle investigator is basically a grant-writing machine who has built enough of a reputation to get his grants funded. He also has to come up with new areas of inquiry and prod his students and post-docs into getting enough data to write a grant for that line of investigation.
They visit the lab, but pretty much never get to do the bench work. And the distance from the lab means that they cannot remember how long things take, so they are always wondering why everyone is so much slower to get the result than they expect.
Being a P.I. is even harder these days, because the funding for the NSF and NIH, etc. have not kept up with the demand. They used to write 2-3 grants expecting to get one funded. These days it is more like 5-8. That is a lot of wheel spinning - writing a grant is not in and of itself productive work.
Film credits have mushroomed even more over the years. In the old days just a few names for a few seconds. Now there are hundreds of names at the end and can take up more than 10% of the movie running time. The movie Clerks 2 credits 163,070 people!
If you're not doing a meta-analysis, you're typically either not pulling any actual data from the reference. References often point to related work that one should understand in order to understand the work in the current paper, or provide a pointer so that the current paper doesn't have to waste pages explaining something that someone else has already explained.
I publish journal articles and reviews fairly regularly, and we only rarely include authors who did literally nothing other than be in the lab or consult. It happens occasionally when a young researcher has been working hard on a related project, but still does not have nearly enough data for a whole new paper. There are some cases where a researcher in another lab provides a reagent you can't get anywhere else, but even then they often review the final manuscript and make suggestions. However, I think that in larger labs this may occur much more often. Our lab is small (3 scientists and 2 student researchers). On one recent paper several collaborating scientists at NIST worked extensively on a part of the project that did not pan out, so they are in the author list even though their work does not appear in the paper. But you can't say they didn't do any work. There are always issues like this when deciding on authorship that are unique to each situation.
However, the physics and genetic articles that have thousands of authors are much harder to justify, and absurd to even think that anyone would go through the list. All but the first few authors are lost in any citation list when the paper is cited. No one will ever see the other names. Plus, it really messes with citation software like Reference Manager (newer versions of Endnote seem to handle it well).
The bigger journals now require author contributions to be listed, which is a good thing (and would be very difficult on a paper with 1500 "authors")
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
That depends on the nature of the paper. Yes, a large number of authors is suspicious on a paper that represents the amount of work that could be carried out by a few researchers in a reasonable length of time. But there are more and more papers out there that come from and could only practically be produced by large-scale collaborations. For those papers, there is no longer a single dominant contributor, or even a small group that can be considered the primary contributors. In those cases, it makes sense to include everyone who was involved in a scientific capacity as an author.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Have you LOOKED at the credits at the end of a movie nowadays???? Makes 5100-odd look like a footnote in comparison. And then remember how long it took to go through all those frigging LOGOS for each company involved in making the fucking thing?
Seriously, Wall Street Journal needs to look into that.
It may explain why movies make no profit.... and suck.
Go look at the credits for a movie from the 1950s and compare it to what you see for any modern film. Not just the ones dripping with CGI, but simple dramas (i.e. compare "Casablanca" with "The Fault in Our Stars").
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I'm glad they are including them now. Used to be the professor used the grad students, promising he'd list them, and when submission time came, he'd forget.
Am I really the first here to link to this classic from the Journal of Irreproducible Results? http://www.improbable.com/airc...
To answer the headline, I don't know. But no amount of sheer quantity will ever displace the paper by Alpher, Bethe, and Gamov for the most entertaining authors list. (I swear I heard a version where someone tried to recruit a Delter, too, but a quick google search isn't turning that part of my theory up for me.)
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
The grad student writes the paper and his adviser wants his name included because he "advised".
I've read enough PhD theses to know that very few students write their own papers. The difference between the chapters that have been accepted for publication in a journal and those that submission is still pending is easily determined. Nevermind the unseen contributions refining the research topic, the methodology, and analysis.
There's a reason science still works by the apprenticeship model. If you think you wrote your own Ph.D. thesis, you're either pathologically egotistical or your advisor died in your second year.
Considering there's an infinite number of prime numbers, and only one of them is even, you could argue that statistically speaking every prime number is odd. Or every prime number large enough to do anything with, if you're speaking cryptography.
Yes, I'm just being difficult. I would've just modded you interesting, but I'd already posted.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
This need for crediting every breathing thing that remotely touched the article makes me think of the credits for movies when the kid fetching the sandwich also has a place due to union rules.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Collecting the data is the actual work. Any idiot with a computer can make the analysis. And draw the wrong conclusions from that.
It's a shame that so many people seem to agree with this. I would put it exactly the opposite: any idiot can be trained to collect data; knowing what data to collect, why to collect it, how it fits in with 100 years of pre-existing data, and how to condense all of that into a concise but readable story is the difficult (and creative) part.
Maybe it's learned from student science labs, where you spend a lot of time getting the mechanics of an experiment to work, then plug the numbers into a pre-set template for analysis. Of course, those labs are exactly about training students to collect data, and not so much about doing science. Maybe it's learned from the media, where an uninformed reporter picks a bit of data out of a paper and concludes the green coffee extract is a fat-cure-all. Maybe it's just that it takes a lot of work to be able to distinguish good work that advances our state of knowledge from a mountain of data that doesn't really say anything.
A lot of fields will list the person who wrote the majority of the words in the paper first, followed by the largest contributors, and finally others in alphabetical order. This gives at least three tiers of contributions.
Nice try, but even if you ignore all the work to get the data, it still only takes one guy (with a computer) to do the analysis. And that one guy can only get a correct result if the data was taken correctly. But he can still screw up the result all by his own.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I don't think that's true. It simply doesn't get rewarded anymore.
PhD Comics - Author List
What matters is how many other papers cite your groundbreaking work.
Not the number of collaborators you have.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
it still only takes one guy (with a computer) to do the analysis.
This isn't even remotely true with many of the physics research projects I've had experience with, where it takes a team of people to develop analysis methods, and a team of people to apply analysis, which may or may not be the same as the first team. When you start having multiple instruments feeding into results, non-trivial theories you're testing, and sometimes people dedicated to specific analysis techniques, it quickly takes more than one person's input to produce a robust, nuanced analysis.
I am listed in a number of physics papers but I have nothing to do with physics - my graduate was in Applied Mathematics. At the time we were doing more and more with computers (four years in the early 1980s and then another four years at the end of the decade and into the next). I crunched a bunch of numbers for them - some of it was verifying the computer's work - and did this on a number of occasions and for other departments. Thus my name ended up in a number of papers. It was common enough that I had to turn down two such projects while working on my thesis.
I actually expected a career in academia but, well, things presented themselves differently than I had expected. I am grateful for that but still a little surprised at how things turned out. But, I digress...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Considering there's an infinite number of prime numbers, and only one of them is even, you could argue that statistically speaking every prime number is odd.
You could argue that, but not in a theorem.
All your axioms must be rock solid, the premises unambiguous, and lead to a proof.
Of course, if this had been a case of forgetting that 2 was a prime, the theorem could have started with "let p be an odd prime...". But it wasn't - the GP only used that as an example.
If you mean wrote it alone, I concur. But the third option I have seen is likewise quite common, which is the disinterested advisor. But research papers in general, and the model for contribution, needs work. As does the value of researchers being assigned by volume of publications. A similar problem has arisen in placement testing: volume over substance. The longer the essay, the higher the score, whether grammar and grasp operated on the post-graduate level or the post-Kindergarten level. Quantity is rarely relevant to quality. Brevity and clarity are high-value arts which are being lost.
You could argue that, but not in a theorem.
Actually, it is if you use well defined concepts like almost surely. One of the nice things about math, is instead of abandoning ideas that are ambiguous, is to find a way of making them robust and seeing where you can go with that.
The US National Science Foundation does now have a policy of allowing researchers to list other types of products, such as the ones that you mention, on their CVs when applying for grants.
I think it started with institutes like CERN, but there are more and more large "instruments" that require hundreds, if not thousands of people to get at a few very interesting results. The main reason is that for instruments like that, the boundary between engineer and researcher is very vague, as every part is a unique design and requires quite a bit of R&D to create.
As a result the papers that do come out of research like that are going to have large lists of authors/contributors.
Pushing the boundaries of science more and more blurs the lines between engineering and research. Turning what would have been engineers into co-authors of the papers that publish the results.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Look here: Our US scientists should clearly be using Imperial technology.
3,000 contributors should be designated as either:
20.83 gross contributors
Damned metric boot-lickers.
Imperial: "Because MURICA!"
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
5,000 people is more people then you could even know by name. That is probably more scientists than are in your entire field of study. You could not have even of has small conversations with all of these people during the course of the research project. That is just too many people for it to ever make sense for most of them to have had an impact on the paper. If I were to credit every single historic scientists who enabled me to finally conduct my research it probably would not even equal 5K people.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You tried to sound smart by using "disinterested" and failed. The proper word in that sentence was likely "uninterested."
Yeah, when they start listing the Bestboy and the Caterers it has gone too far.
This is a bit of a naive view of things. 90% of the work in science is not just standing at the bench doing experiments. There is serious work in managing a lab, that does not consist just of writing grant applications. Good PIs will generate new research directions, instruct their students in how to conduct research, and generally make sure that good science gets done. It might be an intangible effect in the day-to-day activities of PhD students, but in a good lab, it is very important.
Plenty of people don't get credits on movies, but they get paid more. A credit has a (subject to negotiation) cash value.
That's not what I mean. Internally, how does NSF set its budget? Do the PMs get their money based on "other products" or papers published? If the "selection pressure" on program officers is to stick to the metrics (papers published), then they're going to pass that down to their performers.
I have been a program officer in other government agencies (not NSF), and I speak from my experience there. Our mission was technology transition, but our personal performance metrics were papers published. We rarely transitioned any technology (lots of SBIRs and industry collaborations, but those aren't actually technology transition). We did sponsor a lot of papers.
Your characterization of NSF "allowing" non papers on a CV is fairly shocking. In my experience, it's encouraged to have non-papers on a CV to at least pay lip service to the idea that science leads to broader societal impact.
Collecting the data is the actual work. Any idiot with a computer can make the analysis. And draw the wrong conclusions from that.
It's a shame that so many people seem to agree with this. I would put it exactly the opposite: any idiot can be trained to collect data; knowing
Both are hard. I've done both and I can assure you that I find gathering data is often not easy. It obviously depends what you're doing, but in my field a good experimentalist is highly regarded. Things often don't work and debugging your protocols takes brains. I agree that it's stupid to say "Any idiot with a computer can make the analysis". I'd love the fool who said that to come and look over my shoulder for day.
soylentnews.org
I'm not used to the NSF, but my experience elsewhere seems to find that high levels don't care about papers published at all. At the highest levels, things bet a bit political with how money is split up (including days where scientists visit congress to convince members spell out certain subjects). At the middle to high levels, there are a bunch of reports done that determine priority, where further research is needed based on past results and remaining questions. Some offices are so dependent on these reports, I've seen delays with a report cause them to basically freeze everyone's budget and make them do another token proposal for a year extension before allowing multi-year proposals again. The only place I've seen papers kind of come in is special multi-discipline institutes that are created for certain specific topics. But they rarely get more than a single 5-year renewal, regardless of papers produced, as the program's goal is to diversify.
Maybe the data you analyze. But we need more than one guy if we want to finish in anything called a reasonable time period. And we use 100 of thousands of CPU hours doing it. Don't assume the world is as small as your experience.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
They don't know the fact that the cited papers on the introduction are not contributors but mainly competitors which do not exactly needed to be cited. They are there just to represent a reason to publish the paper. "X did this, Y did that, we are doing this"