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posted by janrinok on Sunday March 15 2015, @04:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the recursion:-see-recursion dept.

CBS News Reports:

A growing number of scientific studies is making it harder for researchers to keep track of all their content.

Attention decay in science [link to paper], a new paper published by professors from universities in Finland and California, reports that "the attention that can be devoted to individual papers measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly," due to the overwhelming number of studies.

The research suggests that the decay is accelerating in recent times, signaling that papers are forgotten more quickly. The study focused on scientific research but notes that the same concept can be applied to the internet and popular culture.

The conclusion states that due to the exponential growth of these publications scholars “forget” papers more easily now than in the past, sometimes making it harder to isolate the most relevant information.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by gringer on Sunday March 15 2015, @06:42AM

    by gringer (962) on Sunday March 15 2015, @06:42AM (#157979)

    Keeping track of information is difficult, and journals generally don't like people to pepper their articles with too many citations. If the same information gets spread around, then the chance of citation drops for any particular article that contains that information. This is a problem, even with Watson-level recall, and even the very best papers will suffer from this issue.

    Let's say there's a wonderful paper published in a journal that does a whole bunch of things*. It survives for about 6 months with citations ramping up, but then someone discovers one of those things can be done better. Then, people who would previously cite the big paper and therefore let others know about it, might decide that in their particular area, the new paper is a more appropriate citation.

    About 6 months after that, the paper has hit its "peak citation rate", as the popularity of the paper is eroded in many different areas by the smaller, newer papers. Pick any one of those new papers, and you could easily say the earlier paper is better. However, pick any one of those many things, and you can probably find a better paper for the that particular area of study. Funding sources encourage this behaviour — being better than some previous paper, and fragmenting the research knowledge as much as possible.

    People could read the single big paper and get a great overview, but over time they become more likely to know about the smaller papers which give excellent detail, but are very specific. Over time, the general knowledge of readers is reduced, and they lose track of related work outside their area of expertise.

    * <plug>The closest example to this of a paper that I have co-authored is this one [sciencedirect.com]. It has over 30 sub-projects that stem from an initial de-novo transcriptome assembly and differential expression analysis.</plug>

    --
    Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday March 15 2015, @07:02AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday March 15 2015, @07:02AM (#157981) Journal

    So the Trojan horse is an article with a lot of citations from other articles within other journals? ;)

    I think Evilvier perhaps will get some Troj^H^H articles!

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday March 15 2015, @01:29PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Sunday March 15 2015, @01:29PM (#158012)

    The real problem that this only touches on: Why the heck are we trying to focus on quantifying the value of research and researchers by counting publications and citations? It's not really a numerical thing, and sometimes crackpots turn out to be right and seemingly mainstream folks turn out to be crackpots.

    About the only reason for this behavior I can see is to justify the complete lack of tenure-track positions compared to the number of people qualified to take them. That has a lot to do with the massive cuts in university funding, and the massive increase in spending on non-academic personnel at academic institutions (and yes, deans count as non-academic personnel unless they have teaching duties, which most don't).

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15 2015, @03:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15 2015, @03:31PM (#158030)

      Also the massive increase in more PhDs being trained for positions that do not exist.