David_Gerard comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong

113 Post author: lukeprog 09 May 2011 10:05PM

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Comment author: fiddlemath 10 May 2011 02:08:07AM 12 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: Jordan 10 May 2011 05:05:01AM 15 points [-]

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.

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 May 2011 09:45:58AM *  2 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 10 May 2011 04:01:53PM *  0 points [-]

So a possible first step is to set up a preprint archive for that field

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.)

Comment author: timtyler 11 May 2011 10:06:19AM 4 points [-]

Arxiv accepts papers in any field.

Where are you getting that from? The front page says:

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.

Also there is this:

While arXiv serves a variety of scientific communities, not all subjects are currently covered.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 13 May 2011 06:10:22AM 1 point [-]

Point taken.

Comment author: David_Gerard 11 May 2011 09:53:58AM -1 points [-]

OK, the first step is to get them to use it :-) Why does physics do this but not chemistry?