SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
This latest result is "pretty damning," says University of Maryland, College Park, cognitive scientist Michael Dougherty, who was not involved with the research. "Citation counts have long been treated as a proxy for research quality," he says, so the finding that less reliable research is cited more points to a "fundamental problem" with how such work is evaluated.
[...] University of California, San Diego, economists Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy were interested in whether catchy research ideas would get more attention than mundane ones, even if they were less likely to be true. So they gathered data on 80 papers from three different projects that had tried to replicate important social science findings, with varying levels of success.
Citation counts on Google Scholar were significantly higher for the papers that failed to replicate, they report today in Science Advances, with an average boost of 16 extra citations per year. That's a big number, Serra-Garcia and Gneezy say—papers in high-impact journals in the same time period amassed a total of about 40 citations per year on average.
And when the researchers examined citations in papers published after the landmark replication projects, they found that the papers rarely acknowledged the failure to replicate, mentioning it only 12% of the time.
Well, nobody likes a Debbie Downer, do they?
Journal Reference:
Marta Serra-Garcia, Uri Gneezy. Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1705)
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday July 01 2021, @11:35AM (11 children)
Ah, so they are "economy scientists", right? And, surprise, they came up with an idea of a catchy research.
And then "they gathered data on 80 papers from three different projects". Oh, wow, that many?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday July 01 2021, @03:04PM (2 children)
Isn't citation-count a rather outmoded way of determining the quality of a paper in the 21st century?
Shouldn't quality be determined by number of clicks on the title?
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday July 02 2021, @06:36AM (1 child)
Here's a novel idea, how about basing the quality of a paper on how many tried and succeeded to repeat the results?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 02 2021, @04:02PM
I think you may be on to something!
That fixes (at least) two problems.
Published results that are fake and thus not reproducible.
The incentive for some researchers to actually spend time and money to reproduce results. (You can't exactly get a grant for that right now.)
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 01 2021, @03:09PM (6 children)
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the word "science" actually meant something.
Now it is a suffix word you tack on to confer trust, credibility, study, rigor, care.
How about some sort of pet food science? Oh, wait, we have science diet.
What about a shampoo science?
Fashion Design science.
Gender Studies science.
Masturbation science.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @03:28PM (3 children)
I think, more than anything, we are simply a "secular" (which is much more anti-religious than secular) society, which is rapidly going through the exact steps that historically would have led to the creation of religions. We've already laid out the dogma, the taboo, the general ethical and moral frameworks, and so on. But the problem is now that we need a God. Because without appeal to the ultimate Authority you get tangled down in petty bickering and disputes about nuances, logic, evidence, rationale, and all these other awful things. And so Science, with a capital S, is now becoming the new God.
The fact that things such as dogma and taboo are entirely antithetical to everything that science stands for matters not to Science, because Science is not science. It is religion and it is God. And who is anybody to question Science? Even the input of a scientist is meaningless before that of a Scientist.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday July 01 2021, @03:47PM (2 children)
Science with a capitol S gives us reproducible results. Experiments with variables and controls. And statistical analysis. Consideration of what possible errors the results could contain.
Science with a capitol S gives us real theories. Not what squishy S science calls "theories". A big S theory means it explains all available evidence to date, and makes predictions that can be verified now or in the future. (See Relativity for example. It was published with some predictions about the orbit of Mercury, which at the time could be verified. And predicted gravitational lensing which was soon observed. And other predictions that wouldn't be verified until much later.)
If you don't like a theory of big S science, then all you need is one single reproducible result that falsifies the theory. Your result now becomes part of the body of observed evidence that the next theory must also explain.
Climate change, for example, has observable data and predictions. The controversy is manufactured for political purposes.
Darwin didn't know anything about DNA, but proposed in his theory that there must be some actual mechanism by which traits are passed on and some selected for by various survival pressures. Later DNA was discovered and is the actual mechanism.
The only people saying science is the new God are people who are anti science for purely political reasons. Because they don't like the results.
The earth is flat.
Vaccines cause autism.
The climate is not changing, and if it is, it's not our fault, and even if it were, it would be unprofitable to do something about it.
5G causes covid, cancer and a list of other problems.
Trump won the election.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday July 01 2021, @09:26PM
+6 Insightful
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 02 2021, @03:33PM
I think you and the AC have simply swapped which s/S-cience you give the capital letter to. And in my opinion, the AC is correct. The capital S goes to the god-like entity which can not be challenged, not the practice of investigating the universe.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @03:32PM
> How about some sort of pet food science? Oh, wait, we have science diet.
I've talked to some people that work at Hills in Topeka. It sounds like they really do a lot of work there in regard to pet food nutrition. Including studies and trials with various cats and dogs that get treated very well. You might be surprised how much science they actually do, just saying.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:26PM
Don't belittle it, even if lacking the prediction capabilities of science, that's a craft. Refineable to the art level. I hear many interpretative artists get good money for it on onlyfans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday July 01 2021, @11:00PM
Are you saying their work is stinky bad, or at least minimal? They didn't science the shit out of it?