Really enjoyed this book by Alex Csiszar


Some thoughts on how it informs the science of science literature

1. Commercial "distortion" of sci lit
2. Knowledge diffusion / overload
3. History of peer review
4. History of metricization of science press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book… 1. Commercial distortion
Non-historians (like me!) often think of sci journals as emerging from Phil Trans in 1660s, in 20th C getting increasingly captured by publishing oligopoly, 21st C increasingly polluted by predatory journals.

Book shows commercial/predatory publishing was already huge in 19th C, modern journals arguably look more more like low-status commercial publishers in 19th C than Phil Trans! Our vision of "unpolluted" lit never existed/ahistorical, may not be coming from any first principles

New preprint (provocation?)

📜"𝐃𝐨 '𝐛𝐚𝐝' 𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 '𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝' 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬?"📜

with Honglin Bao (@HonglinB )

arxiv.org/abs/2304.06190

Quick explainer below👇 Project was motivated by a surprise:

1. Famous papers attract many cites, some meaningful but very many performative. Right?

2. Wrong! Famous works attract disproportionately meaningful citations (sciencedirect.com/science/articl…)

3. So if we get rid of performative citations..

(2/n)

🚨 Is novel research worth doing?🚨

There are serious concerns about slowdown in innovation. Are institutions to blame? In science, does peer review discourage novel work?

Paper with @haoopeng @mrblasco and
@klakhani finds the opposite!

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

1/n Countless personal stories and some systematic work on grant competitions (early-stage ideas) tends to show novel ideas are disfavored in peer review, e.g. pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.128…

If so, why do people keep doing novel research?🤔

2/n

Citations are everywhere in academia & often equated with intellectual influence. But many citations seem very superficial. So, which papers get the meaningful citations and why??? 🚨New paper 🚨by @phil_of_ai Michael Menietti, @klakhani and me

1/n

sciencedirect.com/science/articl… First, what fraction of citations in academia actually reflect intellectual influence? We asked randomly sampled corresp. authors from around the globe. According to ~10,000 respondents, 54% of their citations had little-to-no intellectual influence on them!

2/n