Re: Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future



On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, BMJ wrote:

Straydog wrote:

<snip>

LOL.  I wish.  Out of curiosity, what is your publication record?
My very modest publication list includes a dozen authored or
coauthored articles in refereed journals (good ones) and in all
honesty I think maybe one was significant (in that it helped justify
the building and launching of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission
satellite which has been a very successful project).  None of the
others did anything significant that I'm aware of in the sense of
altering the direction of a research field or advancing our
understanding beyond a small increment (which is typical of most
scientific rersearch).



I could say almost the same thing.


Many of the grad students I knew from my grad school days kept low profiles after they received their degrees.

One went to work for an electronics firm, though, apparently, she was part of a group that was granted a patent a year or two ago. Another received an award, tried to start a company but couldn't get any funding for it, and, as far as I can tell, is working for a company completely unrelated to what he studied.

I don't recall any of them publishing anything.

Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is trash)

As relates to the above comments going back many lines, most patents, also, as a measure of significance, do NOT make any money. I recall that the fraction of all patents that make money is in the single digets percent.

holds for scientifuic research, too.


I have a paper, authored by someone decades ago, showing that most published work is NOT cited by anyone else, and there are studies (first by Eugene Garfield, of ISI fame, who showed that he could predict who got Nobel Prizes based on citation frequency, but he also, later, admitted that there were "late bloomers" whose significance was appreciated only after they died, and also admitted that high citation frequency, as predictors of significance, didn't always work; the top example being the "Lowry method of protein determination" having the most citations but being nothing more than a very popular and simple and cheap lab methodology).

Isaac Newton seldom published because he was feared that his ideas would be pilfered.

Then, of course, you have those researchers who, rather than writing one
good paper based on their results, divide them so that they get two or
three publications.

Or more. Its a strategy to pad the CV. Lots of people "buy into" this, and sometimes the average "padder" even can't tell that someone else is padding their CVs, either.


  I've discussed with people

over the years how we might put money only into the 10% that is
good and useful, but a priori there is no good way to know,


This problem is probably unsolvable; it would be embarassing to established, tenured, and recognized authorities/experts because, in the face of a new idea which is not yet accepted, they would not be able to identify it as such. At least not until it (whatever the idea/finding is) became widely accepted/established, which not many would be able to
understand either.

Even if those ideas are published, they may appear initially in lesser-known or obscure journals. Often those publications don't appear in literature searches, which slows their disemmination.

Quite a bit of what passes for recognition is "recognition by the snobs"--or, it takes a "'Harvard' (etc) guy to recognize another 'Harvard' guy" and thus, if you are not in the elite category, then you are dust from the starting line. Recognition by the snobs often means that the manner of communication is not by research->publish->read cycle, but rather by verbal-rumor-from-conference->bzzz-bzzz-bzzz-on-the-
telephone->more-bzzz-bzzz-bzzz-on-the-telephone with muck-muck #2, and, etc. (i.e. the high muck-mucks don't even read the literature).


The related problem is how do chairs and deans come up with criteria for raises and promotions (not mentioning that bad politics can and often does trump merit). Since they are incapable of, in most cases, judging or understanding the merit or significance of the science, they turn to "conjectured consensus" (i.e. look at grant track records, publication numbers, and maybe, in tough places, recognition by the broader community in terms of citation frequency [thus proxying the judgement outside the
local neighborhood]).

Don't forget student evaluations.

In the research universities, where one's survival depends only on grants and luck with avoiding bad politics, research professors (who, almost by definition, don't teach) don't have to worry about this.

<snip>

A loaded comment. The inclusion of the word "most" gets you off the hook. The problem is that funding is often NOT for scientific brilliance, good ideas, or competance but for proposals from recognized PIs in which the recognition is NOT for science but for _productivity_ in terms of: i) number of papers, ii) thickness of papers, iii) numbers of postdocs, and iv) total grant funding and funding track record. Possibly, v) would be "visibility in the scientific community" meaning haveing one's names on the lips of everyone (eg. Bob Gallo). All of i-v can be more easily and quickly scanned in any grant proposal than reading the text of the actual proposals (20-25 pages of the most information-dense text ever written plus many dozens of published papers, also very information-dense) that, I'll bet lots of money, very few reviewers ever seriously read and check out the references. I know, having been on grant review committees, that the primary discussants barely spend more than ten minutes discussing any merits/demerits and you don't get any recourse if they did a crappy job in reading or thinking about it. Oh, yes, institutional snob appeal might be vi. Guys at Harvard (pronounced "Hahvahd") are often a shoo-in, but some dufus at podunk community college surely can't have anything serious (<sound effects on> sound of flushing toilet <sound effects off>).

Then there's the tendency to fund ideas which easily understood or are already popular. 

Yep.

So something in, say, nanotechnology would likely receive
money because a lot of people are working in that field. 

Even better: bioterrorism. Or, any "X"-terrorism. (footnote)

footnote-depends on your government's budget for targeted research. Back in early '80s, basically lousey proposals in HIV-AIDS got funded much more easily than non-HIV-AIDS proposals. Lots of those guys who went for the fads got tenure. And, the ones not in HIV-AIDS? They lost their money
because NIH took money out of non-HIV-AIDS research. So much for funding _quality_.

<snip>

.

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