/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12263311
Renaissance and enlightenment scientists didn't even own their own bodies, they were literally feudal captives to whatever patron took a fancy to their work. The problem with 21st century academia isn't that you're not coddled enough, it's that you're too coddled. Fucking creampuff.

>>12263355
Scientists back then didn't have specific demands from their patrons. Whatever research they wanted to conduct was their decision to make. It gave these geniuses freedom and allowed to make creative innovations.
Nowadays if you're not researching covid then you won't get the funding. What do we have in exchange? Mountains of absolutely fucking useless research with the occasional good article here and there.

Bump

There must be some researchers on this board

>>12263355
Wrong

>>12263799
Woah that’s totally not something a fucking creampuff would write.

Ladies and gentlemen, the absolute state of science in 2020

>>12263835
>actually replying to that troll

>>12263843
a scientist says what?

Engineer researcher here. Academia is full of circle jerking. A lot of papers on high impact journals are completetly useless.

Yeah there's no reason people can't have an open source kind of publishing system like github but its basically a pyramid scheme that forces researchers to stay within the university system or pay ridiculous amounts of money to get papers

>>12265085
>A lot of papers on high impact journals are completetly useless
These are my feelings too. With so many people competing for limited research opportunities, most people just go with whatever flavour of the month research is popular that they think will receive a grant.

>>12265708
I think scihub getting sued is a good example of how big publishers are nothing but extortionists

>>12263311
>Medical research
People like you have. If you want to research medicine educate Medicine graduates to become researchers. You have nothing to do with the field and still you think you can dictate treatment guidelines over statistics.

>>12266833
Actually in Australia many medical graduates are expected to get into research.
Since most medical specialties are very competitive research is one of the ways you can stand out and land the career you want. That's the main reason I'm trying to get involved in it, though I don't think I would ever commit myself completely to research since it really seems like a rat race.

there are a lot of open access publications now, use one of those if you want. even if you don't go open, certainly don't go with elsevier or springer or any other for-profit cockroaches

Pretty good twitter thread highlighting how ridiculous this is:
https://twitter.com/MatteoCarandini/status/1272141942957182978

>>12263311
Yes, just because scientists can't properly install a webserver on VPS to publish their findings and shere it on some scientific feed a link to it....

That's the fail of today's science.

>>12267235
Well, do you think publishing firms like Elsevier actually deliver a service worthy enough to justify the immense profits they generate?

Hello, actual scientist here.
Scientific publishers are literally the science mafia - in cahoots with government bodies and scientific institutions.
Allow me to explain - there are 3 stages to this - the scientific, the publishing (the business) and the governmental - aspects.
>The scientific aspect:
Currently if a scientist wants to contribute to the global knowledge base they have to publish journal papers, because it is the only universally recognized form of contribution.
Anything else like studies, conference presentations, books, etc. is not considered to be nearly as significant or universally recognized as journal papers.
You must publish journal papers - not only to contribute, but also to excel in an academic career - promotions, bonuses etc. are all tied to the number of papers published and the impact factor of the journals.
You might even get fired if you fail to publish enough.

>>12267276
>The business aspect:
Publishers rarely (however, this does happen) invite scientists to publish in their journals - scientists usually seek them out themselves, because there is always some research to publish.
In order for submissions to even be considered, scientist themselves must do the formating according to the journal standard.
Then publishers send submissions to other scientists for review - reviewers are usually not paid or are paid very little in relation to the work they do, because being a reviewer is considered to be a career booster by scientific institutions and being a frequent reviewer of a journal can sometimes mean a better chance of getting your own submissions to be published by that journal.
Then the scientists themselves must improve the research papers based on reviewer comments.
Finally publishers do the least work of all (after sending submissions back and forth between reviewers and scientists) - make the article "look pretty". That is literally it.
After the work is complete, you must pay to have them publish and then once again publish to access it.
Besause of digitization everything can be done electronically, therefore the work they themselves must do reduced even further, as email does not costs, paper does not cost (e-pubblications dminate the market and print journals are disapperaring fast).
They get money for doing almost nothing and spend almost nothing to do it - their biggest expense is server costs. Their profits are obscenely large compared to the ampunt of work they do.
>The government aspect:
Currently governments accredit and review (and also - distribute funding) based on how much scientific institutions publish and in how impactful journals they publish - it is a vicious circle.

>>12267279
I am not sure as to how things got this bad, but government institutions and publishers will never let things change because governments are always slow to change and publishers find this system to eb beneficial to them.
It is up to us - the scientists - and to a lesser extent - other readers (the part of the general public that reads scientific papers - a small fraction of society).

There are some things that can be done, however.
>1.
If you can, publish in open access journals - they are les prestigious, but do not charge readers, only you mus pay for publishing. It is not perfect, but is an improvement over the current system.
>2.
Use sci-hub and lib-gen and let other scientists and readers know about it - if their main source of income is undercut, they will be more reasonable and willing to chenge the current system.
>3.
Advocate for science 2.0 and use it yourself.
Pic related, courtesy of phd comics.
Relevant links for further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_2.0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
https://sci-hub.se/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/index.php

>>12263311
There are lots of problems that have coincided to create this mess.
I worked in a chem lab for a bit and it was much the same. Buzzwords to get funding is what I hate- where I was working it was 'solar cell efficiency' and 'targeted medical applications' etc etc. Now the professor I was working under was clever, and was an actual scientist who cared very much about proving his results, no bs there. He was a good scientist AND a good bureaucrat- these people do exist and they are really the people keeping any scientific progress in the hard scientists alive.

The problem ultimately comes from the idea of 'trying to be fair'. Providing a path where 'you can become a scientist if you do X'. Scientists before 1920s-ish were a club of people who were just interested in their stuff and formed a group- the same way being in a chess club today is not a profession in popular conception, neither was 'scientist'. They wanted to find out why things worked- it wasn't a monetary incentive. There was a fame incentive for some of them, but back then, if you were wasting peoples time on dumb theories, with no predictive power you were just ignored. Note the expantion of crappy FIELDS (let alone research) when science became a 'profession'- (Anthropology, psychology, economics) not that all these are useless 100% on the time, but there predictive theories TEND to be discovered by harder scientists (Biologists, Mathematicians, people just interested in obscure crap etc) not your 'professional anthropologist' .

There is an infection of these 'Corporate people' in science: bureaucrats, but not scientists. This is because they are trying to second guess their research 'aims' to get funding, filter everything through that lens, so the science gets washed up in applications.

Medical i guess is just a field with a lot of snake oil. It is where the peer review system came from and poisoned all other fields. This is why ALL fields begin to stagnate after 1970-

>>12267287
I think the feminized environment also slows inquiry. Mediocre, contextualised, tit for tat research. Not 'lets see if we can prove those a**holes at [x] lab wrong'. Soft language for denouncing bs in other research phrases like 'contradictory to the finding of xyz we find abc and show the methods of xyz did not account for ...' not 'xyz spoke shit, heres why, stop taking them seriously' (which is a translation of the academic language). Its bitchy, backstab stuff. Pretty girls getting positions bc they are nice, tick the boxes, do whats expected- not bc of dedication to truth and inquiry.

>>12267287
>Medical i guess i just a field with a lot of snake oil
Definitely feels like it sometimes. Especially doing research into antidepressants a lot of it appears manipulated in favour of profits.

Until publishers start putting out negative results of experiments it's worthless shit.

>>12268147
It's something I really never understood.

Because yes, it makes sense that publishers will filter negative results as "not interesting" when I have a guy claiming that he can make lasers out of proteins. But public institutions don't really have a need to go through the typical channels and can publish the results themselves since they don't really have to turn a profit or prove that they have the know-how as long as they produce "something".

I mean one of the few things public stuff is for is precisely these kinds of things.

>>12266854
Just ditch that shit and go into medicine as a business. It's fucking worthless to do business just to become another employee. Set up your practice and start using marketing to lure in people.

wasn't elsevier or some other scam institute founded by a greasy scientifically illiterate jew?

>>12267287
the entire field of pharmaceuticals is fundamentally corrupt because you can only make money if you invent new shit that can be copyrighted, and so all research goes into this

and substances that you can copyright aren't even part of the human body, you're literally trying to fix a machine by inventing new parts for it

it's fucking bullshit and a lot of medicine is lies

>>12263355
>woah man big corporations are totally awesome as long as their only exploiting people in the (superficial) name of science and they are willing to parrot woke SJW talking points
>wow I totally love corporations now

The absolute state of modern establishment leftists.

>>12266833
Most countries have doctors publish medical research in order to properly advance their carreers, with specializations and masters requiring a number of published papers inorder to apply

>>12268025
Pharma corporate greed is one of the influencers of corrupt academia practices

>>12268509
Kill yourself, greedy bastard

>>12265085
high impact journals are completely useless*
there is nothing they provide since the internet exists.

>>12266957
this. The only way to fight a parasitic entity is cut off its nourishment. Just don’t buy from or “sell” your research to them. Sell is in quotation marks because you are most likely to pay them so they can sell your work.

>>12263311
All the faggotry surrounding research funding killed science. Productivity this, assessment criteria that; all of this to pander to smoothbrained politicians, soulless bureaucrats and retarded commoners who never set foot in a research lab in their entire lives, but yet think they should have a say in science because "MUH TAXPAYER MONEY".

The result of this sum of stupidity is researches worrying more about meeting quotas than doing any meaningful research. They publish papers that bring absolutely nothing new to the game in high impact journals every few months, so that they get to keep their grants.

>>12266822
>most people just go with whatever flavour of the month research is popular
This is painfully true. My advisor made me work on an absolutely meme topic because it has been receiving a lot of attention recently. By the time realized how fruitless that line of research is, it was too late to drop it and start again with something else. Worst part is that my advisor is one of the big shots in the field.
That was an extremeley frustrating experience. If anyone reading this is starting grad school, I strongly advise you to be skeptical of whichever topic is suggested to you. Do A LOT of literature review before diving into anything. If possible, try to replicate experiments and compare methods with competing approaches as well. Once you get started on your research, it will be very hard to go back.

>>12263355
>>12263364

absolutely this. in the old days a "paper" was just a letter from one scientist to another telling them of their findings or a similar kind of publication to tell their peers.

papers as a formal structured thing with a journal, citations, formatting conventions, etc aren't fundamental to research at all

just study stuff and summarize your findings or arguments

>>12267281
>be a journalist
>people are afraid to talk to me???°o°

>>12267305
This just feels like a way for you to explain all problems with the world within the realms of your own specific ideology.

These posters
>>12267276
>>12267287
Address tangible problems which currently exist in academia that can explain the issues I've brought up.

Your explanation seems like it's just based off what you think based off what seems like no experience in the field. And the problems you cite wouldn't even explain the issue of science stagnating.
Try to shed off some of your ideology it seems to be clouding your reason.

>>12267276
>You might even get fired if you fail to publish enough.
This fucking shit blows my mind. Especially in the STEM field where researchers should be given ample time to preform studies, find out its a bust, and instead of wasting everyone's time with 'I did a thing, trivial results' x10000 papers, just quickly move onto their next study of choice or to, just as important, confirm someone else's results

bump

>>12270132
>I think you're too feminised
>I *feel* like this is what you really mean
kek

>>12267281
Excellent post. Big part of the issue as I see it is universities agreeing to shovel out tons of cash to publishers to get access for their departments. We as people in the department need to stop using that, make use of arxiv/libgen/etc instead, and complain that these access deals be cancelled.
The science community is perfectly capable of forcing the system to change and for things to speed up, and it's getting there. But the science community can also be a little pathetic.

>>12268921
Holy shit, seek help medically ill schizo.

>>12271510
>Woaaahh corporations are like totally awesome maaaannnn, especially now that they claim to support LGBT rights and BLM
>If you criticize corporations then you're a racist neonazi with schizophrenia

Yeah anon, anyone who disagrees with you is totally a schizophenic neonazi. And I'm sure you're completely mentally stable, because as we all know, the surest sign that someone is reasonable and psychologically healthy is that randomly flip out at stuff they see posted on the internet and instantly call anyone who disagrees with them a neonazi/slave owner/schizophrenic.

Take your meds anon. The world is not filled with genocidal nazis and slave owners. Racist white people do not secretly hold 'systemic power' over the global financial system, the police, the criminal legal system, and the mainstream media. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a "nazi". Not everything wrong in the world is because of "white privilege". Ironically, you actually sound crazy as shit when you go around labeling everyone who disagrees with you as 'schizophrenic' while simultaneously screaming at the top of your lungs about how the entire western world is actually an elaborate system controlled by a secret network of "white nationalists" who have covertly structured human civilization in manner designed to preserve "white privilege". Human civilization is not a elaborate system designed by "white nationalists" in order to maintain "systemic power" and "white privilege". Sometimes, life just sucks, and at some point, maybe you just need to admit that you're a loser, and maybe the problems you see in your life and your community were not orchestrated by a global network of "rich white men". Maybe you're just a loser.

>>12272313

In this cotton plantation we call earth, we are all house slaves. Now those cotton picking dogs,cats, cows and chickens.

those asdholes are the real problem. Master doesn't like his crops to arrive late. oops Spoke my mouth i again.

>>12263311
Yes but scihub and libgen saved it

>>12267276
I do applied math research focusing on some aspects of second language acquisition. The problem is most of us are autistic pussies. If we just banded together we could not only stop the publishing scam but the college cost scam.
Qualified profs just need to found colleges and coops like they used to be and do their own internet peer review and quit funding admin and publishers.

>>12263796
Professors are ranked based on the quantity and quality of the research they and the grad students under them produce. Quality of research is based on the reputation of the journal and the number of times the paper is cited. The ranking is roughly as follows;

Best:
Top ranked peer review journals
second tier peer review journals
Patents that result in products on market

Good:
Presentations and posters at events held by professional societies.
Patents that did not become marketable.

Ok at best
non peer reviewed papers
postings on websites
blogs and posts.

I'm a government researcher, so the rules are different, but the idea is the same. Are you producing research that is useful? If so, how much and of what quality?

For people complaining about cliques, that is part of being a researcher. Most people end up having a narrow focus with only a few researchers in the field. You end up interacting with the same two dozen people who share your interest over and over again.

>>12263796
>There must be some researchers on this board
I used to be one. Then I got a need to pay down my student debt and postdoc pay was not an option.

>>12272391
yes, it’s not that hard really. We just have to stop throwing money and free work at them. And not fall for the prestige meme.

>>12272473
>Quality of research is based on the reputation of the journal
this is the biggest load of bullcrap anyone has ever conceived. That mindset is extremely harmful for science in general.

>>12267305
>not bc of dedication to truth and inquiry.
There is no institution in the western world, possibly the whole planet, that is truly dedicated to those things. Maybe there would be if the people who actually care about them weren't a bunch of autistic spergs.

>>12272593
Ok, so what metric would you use?

The Hirsch index is one way to rank scholars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

>>12263311
>those who coveth a thing will bring it into discredit with others.

>>12269655
This. I still enjoy reading JACS papers with

Sir,

as the heading

>>12263355
I'm not saying I agree with this but I like that on 4chan you will hear views like this.

>>12267281
>>12267279
>>12267276
bumping for this brilliant post

>>12263364
This is so completely wrong and historically inaccurate that it's laughable. People didn't become patrons for lulz because they were quirky eccentrics, they had specific demands and expectations. You've got a handful of examples of hyper-rich elites that were incidentally also scientists funding their own studies, mostly based on having been born into money. The vast, vast majority of academics were functionally on pay-roll, doing the work that was expected of them, or were monks, and doing the work that the church demanded of them. The people you're thinking about were few and far between, even in the "wild west days" of Western scientific exploration during the Renaissance and beyond.
You're also ignoring that truly great minds still have the freedom to research whatever the hell they want. You think Tao has EVER listened to the administration? You think Feynman gave half a fuck what was getting funding? You're on payroll doing what you're told because you're just another guy. You'd never be in a position to work independently with the kind of freedom you think every scientist used to have. If you were truly that gifted, you'd be doing independent research on your own and people would be searching you out and begging you to work for them.
>look at how many great innovations there usedtawas and there aint none now why?!?!?!
This is what I'm talking about. This low IQ bullshit. We have invented more things, made more leaps in technology and understanding, we have innovated and changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 8,000. We've made more innovation in the last 50 years than previous 50 before that. We're so absolutely flooded with innovation, and you're so woefully uneducated on the history of science, that you're literally falling for the "can't see the forest for the trees" meme.

>>12273054
To continue, the other aspect of this shit that you aren't seeing is this: there are drastically more highly-qualified and specialized scientific researchers now by any metric than there has ever been in human history, flat out, hands-down, no-contest. Research and science has been "democratized" to such an outrageous degree compared to even just 100 years ago. This is primary reason that the issues that exist with the publish mafia even exist - if there weren't so many professional researchers who needed to use their skills and knowledge to make money, the funding-publishing racket couldn't even exist. This precisely why it's come to rise in only the last 50 or so years, coinciding exactly with the transformation of higher-education into a for-profit, everyone-can-join system. You think it's a coincidence that the economies of the world virtually necessitating highly-specialized degrees and education just to be competitive in the global market happened at the same time that the funding-publishing racket became such a serious concern in the various research communities?
That's another big reason why you can't see the forest for the trees, too - you're surrounded by so many mediocre researchers just trying to get by that all you ever see are the incremental steps. You're also too much of a brainlet - like every single one of us here - to be able to see something that's going to be truly revolutionary as it happens. You're also again too much of a romantic to see the terrifying genius behind technology like PageRank, social media advertising algorithms, machine learning, and so many other things that are being utilized for nothing more than to make money. You look at them being used for corporate gain and scoff at how fucking staggeringly brilliant they are.
We just landed a craft on a 500m wide rock 340,000,000 km away, within 3m of where we wanted it go, for fuck's sake. We've come so damn far in such a short time that it's mind-boggingly.

>>12272793
quality of the research maybe?

>>12273054
>You'd never be in a position to work independently with the kind of freedom you think every scientist used to have.

Everyone has that ability now. Information and computing power is effectively free. Community college students have access to more research databases today than ivy league students did 50 years ago. There are STEM grants for all kinds of things, especially if you aren't from a traditional research powerhouse. I did my PhD research in an application of evolutionary optimization using a couple of borrowed laptops that I would run overnight to find solutions. I still conduct independent research at home on nights and weekends on whatever raises my interest.

>>12273275
>quality of the research maybe?

And you would gauge that how?

>>12272583
Profs are the talent. They are the players in the league. Except the owners aren’t just using public money for stadiums, they’re using it for everything in the form of student loans. And why they don’t get that way they get from inbred alumni or footbaw tv deals.
The players should form their own league.

>>12272593
There are exceptions but this is more or less how it is.

>>12272989
go back newfag

>>12273673
i'm not a newfag but i admit i deserved that reply

>>12273132
>it's mind-boggingly
based

>>12272991
Thank you, you are incredible

>>12273291
if you belie the perception of a journal has any merit, then the same is true for an article.

>>12273666
You are right, most money journals make comes from taxes, so politics has some incentive too to curb this fraud system.

bumping for a better thread than any IQ or schizo bullshit that will pop up instead

>>12276878
high IQ post

>>12267184
Thanks anon