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byrnema comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
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I agree with your professor, it is good politics and also good scholarship to name drop everyone working in the same narrow field as your published article. It shows that you do have a comprehensive familiarity with the literature (and you should) and, valuably, it provides a resource for the next person working on your topic. Finding a 'frame' to introduce each paper can be time consuming, but it is a useful task for understanding how your paper fits in the scheme of things. For this reason, reading a paper without the links is really annoying for someone new to a field. But a paper with well-developed links -- especially a recent review article -- can be the best place to start learning a new topic or to build a citation list from.
Hmm, in such agreement ... do you suppose I might be your professor? (Just kidding.)
You and he may agree less than you think. When pressed, he admitted that this will frequently lead to citing quite a lot of information that isn't particularly relevant to your paper. When you're working in a particular sub-field, it's good to be apprised of the current state of the research, but anyone who simply needs to know the content of your research will end up being bombarded with more information than is actually pertinent. If you want to create a resource for someone who's not already a specialist to become apprised of all the research in your field, you can do a literature review article.
This is actually a pretty frustrating place to start from. Often, the so-built "frame" is setting out to flatter the authors mentioned therein, instead of pointing out what's useful or informative. Moreover, since these sections are more about giving credit and inflating egos than about informing the reader, you're much more likely to see the paper in which an idea was introduced, rather than a more-informative survey paper, written 10 years later, after the important aspects of the concept are really understood.
I lament this state of affairs with the subdued passion of a 1000 brown dwarf suns.
It's ridiculous that wikipedia is more structured and useful that most of the academic literature. I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
That sounds rather like Scholarpedia's plan: http://www.scholarpedia.org/
Not completely. And working through the fine print of my disagreement here helps to show just how rich the field of possibilities is for an alternative to the current system.
In some ways, Scholarpedia is more closed than the current print journal system. After all, anyone can start a journal - there are journals of intelligent design studies, for example. But it probably would not be possible to get Dr. Izhikevich's approval for an encyclopedia of ID under the scholarpedia umbrella, nor to get the curator to allow an ID-promoting article into Scholarpedia's evolution encyclopedia. Scholarpedia promotes open access for readers, but not for authors.
There is also some question of whether Scholarpedia embraces the open source mentality - there is the whole complicated question of derivative works.
One difficulty with having "awesome wikis on every modern research area" (e.g., waffling) is that there just aren't enough people in the intersection of people who are on the frontier of waffling and people who want to contribute to the waffling wiki.
For a more concrete example, the DispersiveWiki basically runs on the fame of Tao alone. In the past thirty days, his was the only non-userpage edit. The Tricki is another example, this time running off of Gowers' fame.
Intelligent design seems to have found an online home here.
I understand that this is sort of what happens in physics - arXiv preprints (where anything good is expected to be developed into a peer-review-worthy journal article) and a specialist blogosphere. The exchange of prestige and hence the academic credit economy seems to still happen. I suspect the key factor here is arXiv being open-access. So a possible first step is to set up a preprint archive for that field and get the researchers blogging.
Arxiv accepts papers in any field. Researchers in medicine, chemistry, etc, just do not use it.
ADDED. Oops, I was wrong. From now on, I'll think more before I hit that "Comment" button. (I still think that setting up a preprint server has already been tried in all academic fields except for those where it was obvious that it would not work. Also, I am pretty sure that arxiv.org tried to extend into computer science but never got a sizeable fraction of the papers in that field.)
Where are you getting that from? The front page says:
Also there is this:
Point taken.
OK, the first step is to get them to use it :-) Why does physics do this but not chemistry?
Ok, your next task is to figure out a way to make academics gain status by participation in that plan. :)
That is the heart of the social engineering problem at hand.
Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on StackOverflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. The question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place.
First, I think it needs to become generally accepted that the current equilibrium is broken and that there are alternatives. To that end I encourage all academics to discuss it as openly as possible. Once that happens I think (hope) it will just be a matter of high status individuals throwing their weight around properly.
An 'open-source science' original-research version of Wikipedia, perhaps? With everything explicitly licensed under an attribution-required copyright?
Edit - please disregard this post
Seconding the recommendation of following the Open Source model, particularly Stack Overflow. I'm also a big fan of the many OSS-focused IRC channels, where you'll typically be able to find grouchy-but-helpful people to advise you on the fine points of nearly any nearly piece of software.