Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Academics Write Rubbish Nobody Reads



Obviously something is severely wrong regarding the whole publication process.  Clearly a central issue is that the quality of these papers is non judgemental inasmuch as the bar is low enough to allow most to get published.  You learn how to prepare the work and that is it.

No one tells you if the paper is worth reading at all.  And that is a problem.  Exactly who cares about the apparent geology of a given square mile of rock unless you are the owner?  Yet data does need to be recorded as well and it should be reviewed carefully.  Yet it is not a thesis of new knowledge from a theoretical perspective.

The truth is that good lab data needs to be reviewed carefully and published with as little hypothesizing as possible.  That should be the real standard for most science.  Instead far to much of all that data is simply set aside and lost.

 Real theoretical work needs to be identified as such and opened to comment as well.  It is not enough to have two reviewers read the material.  This should also be rare...

Academics Write Rubbish Nobody Reads

Daniel Lattier
Thursday, October 27, 2016

 https://fee.org/articles/academics-write-rubbish-nobody-reads/

Professors usually spend about three to six months (sometimes longer) researching and writing a 25-page article to submit an article to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will, therefore, be read by…
Yes, you read that correctly. The numbers reported by recent studies are pretty bleak:
- 82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once.
- Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read.
- Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.
So what’s the reason for this madness? Why does the world continue to be subjected to just under 2 million academic journal articles each year?
Many academic articles today are merely "creative plagiarism": rearrangements of previous research with a new thesis appended.Well, the main reason is money and job security. The goal of all professors is to get tenure, and right now, tenure continues to be awarded based in part on how many peer-reviewed publications they have. Tenure committees treat these publications as evidence that the professor is able to conduct mature research.
Sadly, however, many academic articles today are merely exercises in what one professor I knew called “creative plagiarism”: rearrangements of previous research with a new thesis appended on to them.
Another reason is increased specialization in the modern era, which is in part due to the splitting up of universities into various disciplines and departments that each pursue their own logic.  
One unfortunate effect of this specialization is that the subject matter of most articles makes them inaccessible to the public, and even to the overwhelming majority of professors. (Trust me: most academics don’t even want to read their peers’ papers.) Some of the titles in the most recent issues of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion – which proclaims itself as “the top academic journal in the field of religious studies” – serve as evidence:
  • “Dona Benta’s Rosary: Managing Ambiguity in a Brazilian Women’s Prayer Group”
  • “Death and Demonization of a Bodhisattva: Guanyin’s Reformulation within Chinese Religion”
  • “Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women’s Disability in Rabbinic Marriage Law”
Thus, increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves.  
All of this is very unfortunate. Ideally, the great academic minds of a society should be put to work for the sake of building up that society and addressing its problems. Instead, most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading.
What a waste.

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