In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next study? Point in case from an area that ought to be relevant to almost every single scientist on the planet: research evaluation.
Genetically Separable" href="https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14" target="_blank">Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically Separable
“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is what scientists say to acknowledge the work they are building on. It is a statement of humility and mostly accompanied by citations to the primary literature preceding the current work. In today’s competitive scientific enterprise, however, such humility appears completely misplaced.
The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” boycott against Elsevier and even that drew less than 15,000 measly signatures, a drop in the bucket with 970,000 board members, reviewers and authors working for Elsevier largely for free.
The other day I was alerted to an interesting evaluation of international citation data. The author, Curt Rice, mentions a particular aspect of the data: In 2000, 25% of Norwegian articles remained uncited in their first four years of life. By 2009, this had fallen to about 15%. This shows that the “bottom” isn’t pulling the average down. In fact, it’s raising it, making more room for the top to pull us even higher.
UPDATE: I’m still not completely sure I understood Churchland accurately, but there are comments suggesting I may just have completely misunderstood her replies to the interviewer. Read the interview and judge for yourself! I really like Patricia Churchland.
Luckily, there are many roads to open access to publicly funded research.
Barely a fortnight has passed since Science Magazine published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.
This year’s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior (WCALB) will be on one of my oldest and most central research projects, the commonalities and differences between operant and classical conditioning.
By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in Science Magazine last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless.