Academics argue over how many people read and cite their papers (2014)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
(Personally I doubt those numbers, but I have no hard evidence to back that up.)
Having a deliverable is useful. It focuses your efforts, provides clarity of thought, and gives you a target.
It's often that only when explaining something we realize we don't understand the thing.
Even papers nobody but the author reads are useful.
But to a very, very limited extent. Why do we publish papers? Because we want to share the knowledge we generate. Papers are the very essence of the ideal of open science - science that is accessible not just to the people who did the work, or those who paid for it, but (in theory) to everyone. Papers are there to communicate information, but communication always requires a recipient as well as a sender. Ergo, if our papers aren't being read, there is no recipient, there is no communication: our papers have failed their most basic raison d'etre. And because they are our most important method of communicating, you could say that open science itself has failed.
Yes, there is a value in writing up your thoughts and results just for yourself. But then why go through the hassle of publishing? Why waste paper and ink (in a printed journal); and more importantly, why waste the time of the reviewers, editors and typesetters involved in the process?
Also, just because it didn't get read right away doesn't mean it's a failure. Ask some gray haired academics how often they've seen (first hand or otherwise) an obscure paper from decades ago become key in solving a modern problem.
True, but don't tell me that all of nearly a million unread papers published this year (accepting the Smithsonianmag's figures as true, for the moment) are going to solve a key problem of science in 50 years...
This can not be assessed. Even if you could somehow determine whether a paper was read or not, how long after publication do you wait until you declare it "never read"?
And I certainly wouldn't consider that a failure.
I'm sure there are other examples of research catching on decades later.
A lot of research is supposed to be new, uncertain, high-risk, high-reward. So it should fail often.
[A lot is also to be meticulous fact-checking, building certainty to later build new breakthroughs on.]
IMO, there is a real problem with people doing bad research they know is bad, but I wouldn't say that the 50% unread figure is the thing to focus on.
> A lot of research is supposed to be new, uncertain, high-risk, high-reward. So it should fail often.
Setting aside the question of whether or not science ought to be the way you describe it, what do you mean by research "failing"?
IMO, there are two levels on which research can fail. The first (and I get the impression that you are describing this type) is the failure of some new theory to be corroborated by the facts, or the failure of a new approach to fulfill its promises, or a later experiment contradicting an earlier one. But this is part and parcel of the scientific method. In fact, this leads to an advancement of science, as we then know which explanation is not correct, or which observations need more detailed scrutiny. And so, such a failure of research is actually a success of science.
However, this scientific process is based on scientists exchanging their findings freely so that they can cross-check each other. Thus, the second and much greater failing of research would be to fail to communicate itself. And that is exactly what (appears) to be happening. If scientists aren't reading what their colleagues publish, that is not a failure of research - the research itself might be fantastic, but if nobody reads it, who is going to know? This is not a failure of research, this is a failure of science. And that is a much more serious issue altogether.
I'm assuming a charitable readership - but its frequently stated, and I agree, that industry is for high value things we know will work, science/research/academia is geared for less certain / more speculative projects difficult to commercialise yet.
> If scientists aren't reading what their colleagues publish, that is not a failure of research
Well, maybe?
Or maybe the paper authors hoped the results would be amazing, but they were only mediocre [research issue]; but they decided they might as well publish after getting the results (which is good), and some people skimmed the abstract; but it wasn't as interesting to others as the authors hoped (diverse perspectives; good); or the whole field went a different direction; or the specific competition found a better technique/result in the interim [research issue] and got all the love.
That's all just how research goes - doesn't mean anyone is failing to communicate necessarily.
> This is not a failure of research, this is a failure of science.
Maybe; maybe not.
I agree there's lots of problems in science, but based on my limited experience, I'd expect and think its OK for lots of stuff to be unread; lots of dead ends.
Lots of startups should fail too, that's not a bad thing; its like there's simply a high bayes error.
IMO real failure is things like people making up data, or doing research they know is bunk (maybe they hacked their p-values or left out data, or something) or continuing research they discovered is useless but their Adviser is politically wedded to etc.
Not being read is not a failure in research, it's a total failure in the system.
It's like paying for ads where 50% are never even published. It's a scam, not the cost of doing business.
Except that has nothing to do with papers not being read. Papers that detail failure are usually never written, and if they are, they're not published. But in any event, reports of failure should be read almost as much as reports of success.
In addition, bad research and unread papers are two completely separate problems, that may not be related in any way whatsoever.
Papers are not read but because researchers must churn out a lot of papers even for results that are partial or not very interesting on their own, so we are flooded with what basically amounts to noise. It obviously makes sense that a lot of research would turn out to be not very interesting, but that shouldn't result in papers being written and published. I guess that even those who publish those papers would rather have more time to bring ideas to the point where they become interesting, or conclude that an approach has failed, but the system doesn't work that way, and that's a failure of the system.
For example, I am sure there are many plausible gene-editing protocols, but none are as robust as CRISPR. Of course the papers that describe CRISPR are going to be cited more, since that protocol is going to be used in many other studies.
By the same argument, 99% of webpages are never visited by anyone but bots, but that isn't a "crisis of the internet", just a lot of junk.
It would be nice (and I don't know how) to provide a clearer division between junk and real journals -- I now basically ignore all new journals, unless I know someone involved personally (either as editor, or author). That's the only way I can stay sane, but it doesn't seem like a good system.
[Edit] I found the original papers (see above), but unfortunately the relevant one is closed-access...
The reason academics argue about citation counts isn't necessarily that they care, but that, at many institutions, citation counts are directly tied to hiring decisions.
Is there something widely read that is not particularly insightful?
Is there a buzzfeed of journals?
Not trying to sleight an author, just curious what attention culture looks like in academics. Perhaps it doesn't exist, or it's driven by author reputation or some other effect.
I got to talking with one of their editors a while back, they know they are the 'gatekeepers' to a scientific career, and they hate it. The guy said that in the first week of the year, the submissions that they have for just the first week for the first issue are so much, and of such high quality, that they could just shut down the rest of the submissions for the year and see no drop whatsoever in quality. Getting into Nature or Science is so prestigious, it will make your career if you are grad student. Unfortunately, it is effectively a lottery to get in them.
Not to say you can't "make it" in other journals, but Nature and Science are sure things. If you are a post-doc in some fields, you pretty much have to get in Nature or Science, sometimes twice, to be considered as a faculty recruit worth mentioning. It's a giant god-damn mess of a system. It is very 'up or out' and as such, we waste billions training students that have no chance, doing work that languishes in unranked journals, and generally loosing the trust of the public that pays us.
NIH is trying to help, but it and the NSF are so inundated with Bullshit Artists and Yes-men that I doubt they can get away from their sclerotic bureaucracies and change.
Meho 2007: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2058-7058/20/1/33/... (not open access)
Evans 2008: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.183...
Lariviere & Gingras 2008(?): https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.5250v1.pdf
The third paper is especially interesting, as it brings forward what seems to be a pretty solid analysis that goes against what the previous two authors (and the Smithsonianmag) say about the state of science. So maybe there is hope yet :-)
Sometimes you're just ahead of your time, or in too niche of a field.
All that being said, the writing papers does seem to be the academic version of the corporate hamster wheel.
First, the need to publish is due to the publish-or-perish strategy, that forces authors to put out 1-2 papers per year in order to stay afloat. If you work in research, you realize at some point that advancing the state of the art in any field is hard. It takes intuition, dedication, some luck, and most importantly a LOT of time. That is, /years/ of work where nothing comes out. The world-class papers you see in Nature are works of years, not months.
Ignore bad research for a moment: imagine you had only great researchers, which is what we'd all like to sustain. This is /fundamentally/ incompatible with the current model. You have two strategies as a researcher: put out crappy work to sustain a larger project, or publish bite-sized pieces of your larger work over time, which leads to incredibly specific papers that taken by themselves seem useless. If you take the second path, it's obvious that you'll also take advantage of the weak spots of the system, and cite yourself on each subsequent paper you publish. This is common knowledge. Because you need whatever you have to stay afloat.
The first strategy (keep the bigger task going) is almost never attainable. In fact, if you need infrastructure, such as a lab of any kind, it's impossible to pull off. This is something that only a tenured researcher working in a very successful team or with good connections might be able to do. Aside from your vision, and any grant you might have, you need mindshare in your fellows and your supervisors to simply let you do it. This is much harder than it needs to be, with too many factors out of your control.
As for the "unread" output, I'm not worried. I assume there's a good 30% of papers which are just turmoil due to the above system. As said, this very system has pushed authors to publish even more, increasing artificially the number of publications one would have written. This is also placing a burden on new authors that need to do literature research. Finding all relevant articles about any subject has become a massive task, even ignoring the problem of getting the articles themselves.
But how can you tell if the published works are worth it or not? It's impossible. Consider the evolution of all the odd fields of math, most of which would have seemed just ludicrous at the time of publication for anybody but the author. Stuff like origami to fold an antenna on a space telescope. Again, if you considered all past works and projected forward, you'd realize there's no way an honest reviewer could tell "this is useless".