Hacker News Reader

Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Chiming in from Bio: Yep, this is true here too.

I can't find the citations right now, but there was a recent study done through Elsiver's website. The group got a hold of the servers for Elsiver and took a look at page views. They wanted to know what the rates of papers being read was. It was... disheartening. They found that ~46% (again, not sure here as I can't find the source) of papers will never be looked at outside of the authors, reviewers, and the editors. The articles are not only never downloaded, but the pages are never even loaded. The stats were, to me, confusing, but hey that is what peer review is for. Still, if you take this paper (that I can't find now) to be true, ~half of all papers are effectively lecturing into the void. I admit, I drank a bit after reading that one.

View on HN

In CS, most authors host "preprint" copies of their papers on their own website, and most views are of those versions. So I wouldn't be surprised if Elsiver's defunct distribution system isn't getting used much (at least in this field).

Yes, but roughly half of all papers will never even be page-loaded from the 'official' source (if you believe my recollection). I am not a CS researcher, but I would imagine that of 10 people that cite a paper, at least one will bother to download the original paper or look up the source. Hell, even 'vanity' page-views of your own work would have been counted in the paper that I mentioned, and that is with many authors on a single paper too.

I honestly don't know what to make of it really. I at least bother to look at my papers once, if only to show my family on the Holidays, and I have a lot of so-authors that may be doing the same. Are most researchers so fed-up with their own work as to not even bother looking at it again? What is going through their minds concerning their efforts? It's just ... heartbreaking. At least half of researchers don't seem to care at all, not even the people that put all that time and effort to get their research out there. Like, what are we doing with our lives?

To be fair most papers are written for readers that have the exact same viewpoint and specialty. So they are incredibly difficult to parse for people in the same field but a different sub specialty.

I think many more papers would be read if authors invested more time in learning how to write.

Depends if they're counting abstract html views or full pdf hits. I'd expect the former to be 10x the latter at least.

Isn't that plausibly the result of publish or perish? I would imagine it would lead to people publish at the cadence of their typing rate (to be cruel), not at the rate which they can generate good ideas.

Higgs said he could have not been able to operate in todays academia. Not everyone needs to have John von Neumann performance levels to do valuable work.

Yes, but to have ~half of the papers not ever be at least page-loaded? If that is what PoP has done to us, then we are really lost!

Perhaps people skim through the abstract in a way that does not register as a page-load?

IIRC a lot of that has to do with spammy 'publication mill' journals. If you just look at 'decent' journals, the situation doesn't look nearly as dire.

Elsevier is a despicable firm, but their journals are hardly publication mills, so not sure that response holds water.

Yes, Elsevier is far from a journal mill designed to H-index hack your way up the credential ladder. They are scum, yes, but they are at least truthful.

Maybe if Elsevier was open source & easily accessible more people would read it. I have tried reading many journal papers as a layman but in most cases got blocked by a pay wall. I dont like to rely on newspaper headline but like to go the source and because of paywall I get thwarted.

sci-hub should be your friend.

In addition, you can just email the authors too. Most, if not all, are very happy to send you a copy and help explain things too. Most scientists do want to talk about their work!

Elsevier used to demand you sign over all copyright, which would make that illegal (think about it...!!) They've also sent takedown notices to academics that posted their own articles on their own website. Oh, and by the way, Elsevier also sued Sci-hub and LibGen...

The Wikipedia article has a long section of criticism of Elsevier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...

All true!

But that said, I don't know of any author that wouldn't give you a gratis copy, oh, ok, maybe an old 'draft' that is 'close' to the publication.

> "lecturing the void"

This seems, at first, to be a problem in academia, but, at further glance, is really a problem with education.

Yes, even ideas exist in a marketplace.

Is there a way ppl is reading papers using sci-hub nowadays instead of accessing the official pages (especially students I'd assume)? :)

My own experience: When I have been on a University campus' wifi and needed to look at a paper, I could download and see the entire article, not just the abstracts. This has been true for all of the limited number of times I have tried this. I have also done the same at some, but not all, conferences; typically the very large ones only. I would then doubt that the numbers are being skewed towards the scihub and other 'rebellious' forms of paper acquisition. However, this is only my experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com