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The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.
The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.
Source: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday April 10 2018, @03:56PM (2 children)
You're equating zero citations with zero awareness. They're not identical. When research findings are published, that's what 'advancing the field' means.
The difference might not be all that important - this might seem purely academic. (I'll show myself out.)
It seems to me though that there is a difference. If you make a novel discovery but no-one cares, it's still a novel discovery.
By your definition, if a paper goes uncited for 20 years and then gets cited, then, what? For twenty years it doesn't count as advancing the field, but then after all that time it does? Or does this new paper also have to be cited before it counts? Apply inductively.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 10 2018, @05:00PM (1 child)
No, I'm talking about papers with zero awareness beyond the people who wrote them and edited them for publication, which there are good reasons to think are common [smithsonianmag.com]. Which isn't really surprising, since, according to that article, there are something like 2 million papers published every year published in 30,000 journals, and even if you divide that by 50 or so fields of study that's still thousands of papers scattered over hundreds of journals you would have to read and fully digest if you really wanted to stay current. Even if you divided each of those 50 fields into 10 subfields, that's still probably more than somebody can handle. That being damn near impossible, even for a very dedicated academic, most don't try.
For comparison's sake: Really keeping up with academic literature would be like knowing, off the top of your head, what major bugfixes and features are currently being worked on for every package in your favorite Linux distribution's official repository. I'm guessing you don't, and more to the point most admins and developers don't.
And that's why a large percentage of papers are ignored: Sheer volume of material. Plus, in a lot of fields, a lot of that material is silly and pointless (e.g. I worked on an educational website with one academic who has billed herself as the world's leading expert on occupational injuries of classical musicians, and once you boiled away the filler what you were left with amounted to "If it's hurting, you should go to a doctor").
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday April 12 2018, @02:45PM
That makes more sense.