In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product.
In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academic journals/conferences, which generally do a piss poor job of providing incentives for either doing good work or communicating well about that work.
Any time I hire a junior PhD I have to UNDO a ton of academic writing/provlem-solving propaganda and reteach both common sense and normal writing style.
The harsh truth is that private sector scientists tend to do better science and disseminate it in more useful and lasting ways. They are paid better for it.
The academic scientists who are up to private sector standards tend to have diverse funding mechanisms and therefore rely far less heavily on prestige publication for their labs revenue stream. But most professors must publish papers because they are unable to do good work and/or communicate the value of that work to anyone other than their inner circle of friends (who sit on the grant review panels or take stints at federal agencies).
I have only worked with one business that did not require NDAs, and that was because it was built around an open-source sharing philosophy. Every other client, even very small organic-growth businesses and pre-seed startups, required an NDA, and if they hadn't I would have advised them that they should.
Are you are aware there is a world outside the USA?
It’s important to point out that US professors are sometimes able to go without public patronage, but that this is very much an anomaly.
The US private sector funds A LOT of R&D relative to other countries, and the US attracts an outsized amount of FDI targeted at R&D.
As a result, in the USA there are occasionally rare instances where professors can mostly fund labs without government patronage.
Scientists in other counties are even more desperate for public patronage (and its associated political games) than US scientists
In 2021, academic R&D spending in the US was ~$90 billion (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/funding-sources-of-acad...). Out of that, 55% came from the federal government, 25% from the institutions themselves, 6% from nonprofits, 6% from businesses, 5% from state and local governments, and 3% from other sources. The share of businesses looks normal, while the share of nonprofits seems low.
I’m pretty damn sure you’re wrong about Europe on a relative basis. The percentages in most of Europe are MUCH higher. Eg Germany is closer to 80% than 50% gov funded.
(Earmarked gifts to an endowment with some level of direction/advice vs a foundation is a real cultural and tax policy difference, but the end effect is what matters and that’s not as simple as you’re suggesting.)
And not to be too flippant, but the question about the world outside of America applies also to the world outside the West ;)
We could take the University of Helsinki (Finland) as a singular example. 56% of the external research funding comes from the national government and 14% from the EU. 16% is from private foundations, 9% from businesses, and the remaining 5% from other sources. The 16% figure from foundations is lower than it would be under the American model, as many private grants (particularly fellowships for PhD students) are awarded directly to the individual and therefore not included in the figures for the university. Overall, 70% of the external research funding is from the government, 25% from private institutions, and 5% from other sources.
I didn't include the share of research funding from the university itself, because I don't know what is included under it by American standards. If you adjust the American figures to exclude that, you get 80% from the government, 16% from private institutions, and 4% from other sources.
It's good to remember that Europe is not a continent of social democratic welfare states but a continent of warmongers and old money that happens to be quiet for the moment. A lot of that old money went into foundations that fund prestigious things such as arts and science. European private donors don't like funding education, as they consider it a government responsibility. American donors on the other hand often give money to universities, which then use it primarily for education, buildings, and infrastructure.
And even then usually only because it’s expected, not because it was actually useful. (And no, it’s not because academics are more ethical about acknowledging the shoulders they stand on. Academics rarely cite the chip designs, software libraries, lab instruments, instruction documents, training materials, etc. What “counts” as something that deserves a citation mostly boils down to “did you publish it in a venue controlled by other academics”, not “how important was this to enabling your contributions?”)
The fortunate thing about the private sector is that you don’t have to spend years of your life shaping opinion on citation ethics, because people are using your stuff instead of half-interestedly saying that they may’ve skimmed the intro to a pdf describing your stuff. And if people use your stuff and get value from it you can usually extract some of the value that creates. Which means you don’t need vanity metrics to convince some government agency to throw you some coin.
Either way my point stands. Since they are citing the research as foundational in their papers, then we should take them at their word. The idea you put forth that they're only doing so as a matter of show puts a terrible light on them if true. They shouldn't be citing research as foundational if it really isn't. So I will choose not to believe your characterization, because I think very highly of the industry researchers I know, and that doesn't seem like something they would do.
That said, even if we accept the general premise of your post, which I don’t, you’re still drawing the wrong conclusion.
To wit: citing something does not imply that the cited thing is “foundational” to the work from which it is cited. One can cite work for any number of reasons. (Admittedly, citation behavior did change with the rise of bibliomaniacs, but of course that further bolsters my overall point, so I’m not sure the daylight on this point does you any favors.)
You identified some counter-examples that miss the point because they’re unrepresentative, unresponsive, and irrelevant.
Unrepresentative because we are discussing literature in aggregate and this behavior is common.
Unresponsive because, in aggregate, inessential academic writing is systematically over-cited in academic writing and essential inputs of other types are systematically under-cited in academic writing. This is true of all academic writing; it’s a bias of the medium and of the medium’s standard bearers.
And irrelevant because there is nothing a priori or essentially nefarious about the above, on its own!
Academics beat ideas and lines of inquiry deep into the ground. Crucially, they do so by pumping out ridiculous quantities of PDFs. For every little variation there is a paper. Outside of academia this isn’t done. Eg: you cite Package X, great! But do you cite the 17 different PRs most relevant to your work, many of which are at least a papers worth or work? No. That’s culturally off. But for the corresponding thinly sliced papers that’s what you have to do.
Conclusion: academic work dominates the citation list because of publication and citation culture, not because academic work dominates the set of enabling contributions.
I do trust that you genuinely do experience the world as you describe here, but I think you’re a fish in water and that Upton Sinclair quote about paychecks comes to mind.
I neither wrote nor implied that. Sure there are many reasons to cite papers, but in saying "citing the research as foundational", meaning that their foundation is the reason for their citation. You were so eager to write all those words you didn't stop to actually read mine. Therefore, I think that's all I have to say to you, I'll leave the rest unread.
Pedantic and profoundly wrong but always in some ridiculous lens always wiggling enough to never let truth get on the way of Being Smart And Right. Peak .edu and the reason it’s so damn hard to justify science spending to the actually hard working tax payers patronizing this stuff.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of paywalled academic publications.