Re: stop railing against other people, ART Sowers.



On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Jul 19, 9:30 pm, Aging_Recycled_Scientist <bike...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I have reviewed Art Sowers publications. and grants. He keeps
harping on the notion that the system did him wrong. Based on his
performance and research interests, every one should realize that Art
built his own system to failure. His work was mundane and not
fundable. Stop complaining Art you are a whiner and a fraud

Most folks' research is relatively mundane and even borderline
"boring" to most non-specialist folks outside of the field.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law


I don't see how a person who does not know a field can be considered a _peer_, but it is actually quite common for, for example, a tenure review committee to be formed out of other members of a department, who usually have backgrounds in areas outside of the field of the candidate.

The same is quite often the case in grant proposal reviews: primary reviewers may be coming from related but not the same field, but I've seen many from fields unrelated to the topic of the proposal. And, I have plenty of evidence that they don't carefully read proposals.

Whether research is mundane or not is debatable depending on the criteria for making the judgement. If the judgement is based on citation rate (which is usually assumed to be a "peer-based" measurable), then it is clear that most published research is never even read. When one factors in that only a few journals are heavily read (eg. Science, Nature, PNAS, etc), then the goal should be to get one's paper into those journals. This is, however, basically unfeasible because the rejection rate at those journals is far higher than average and the secondary purpose of publishing (namely to satisfy promotion requirements and minimum publication rate standards to retain a job) becomes the primary purpose (which _was_ "to publish research results") and if one spends too much time re-submitting a rejected paper, then one is taking too much time to get work published.

So, therefore, the scientific community as a whole is, to some degree, hostage to the whims, prefernces, biases, and significance-detecting abilities of a few editors at the top journals who decide if a particular report is "exciting" enough that the paper will actually be reviewed to see if it is "exciting" to the sellected reviewers as well as those editors who think first about whether the results are "exciting" and think second about whether the study was carried out scientifically and competantly.

Then, there is the "toilet paper" category of publications. This means "the trivial" findings, the "short" paper, the paper that is essentialy a confirmation or repetition of some other paper's result but really nothing new. It also includes incompetant work that comes from incompetant people and thus represents a failure on the part of the community to "police" itself.

Lastly, there are papers reporting something significant that are given a hard time by people who can't recognize that there is something significant in the paper. I had a manuscript rejected once that I considered contained a significant but new finding. The reviewer used every sentence he wrote except the last sentence to cut my work to ribbons. In the last sentence, however, he wrote something like this: "I don't know, maybe this is something important." Eventually that manuscript was accepted for publication in another journal.

Most scientists have a more difficult time if they pursue avenues of research that are more creative, original, or new because all of those avenues are more risky and involve more unknowns. The demands of maintaining high publication rates means that real science--the pursuit of the unknown, the significant, and expansion of our sphere of knowledge--gets short changed in favor of the _mundane_, or, one of the
words you used in connection with discussing "...most folks' work...."

.

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