CarlShulman comments on Problems with Academia and the Rising Sea - Less Wrong

28 Post author: JonahSinick 23 May 2013 07:17PM

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Comment author: CarlShulman 24 May 2013 03:52:18AM 6 points [-]

This is an issue with efforts to encourage replication and critique of dubious studies: in addition to wasting a lot of resources replicating false positives, you have to cite the paper you're critiquing, which boosts its standing in mechanical academic merit assessments like those used in much UK science funding.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 24 May 2013 10:09:33AM 6 points [-]

We would need a scientific equivalent of the "nofollow" attribute in HTML. A special kind of citation meaning: "this is wrong".

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 24 May 2013 05:03:46PM 3 points [-]

15 years ago, the academic search engine Citeseer was designed not just with the goal of finding academic papers, identifying which ones were the same, and counting citations, but, as indicated in its name, showing the user the context of the citations, to see if they were positive or negative.

Comment author: satt 25 May 2013 03:02:30PM 0 points [-]

I've occasionally wished for this myself. I look forward to semantic analysis being good enough to apply to academic papers, so computers can estimate the proportion of derogatory references to a paper instead of mechanically counting all references as positive.