Dr. Andy Wai Kan Yeung (pictured here, below) of the University of Hong Kong analyzed several years’ worth of Ig Nobel Prize-winning studies. He published a paper telling how he did it, and what he found. You can download the paper. Here’s the citation: “Not just nickel-and-dime: An analysis of journal articles winning Ig Nobel […]
Researchers point out that as a field of research becomes big, much of the attention sinks into a middling pool of ideas. Unlikely ideas tend to get squeezed out. They explain, in this study: “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science,” Johan S.G. Chu and James A. Evans, Proceedings of the National Academy of […]
“All these papers were deliberately bad. They were created with the purpose of exposing exploitative publishing practices. That is, the works collected here were sting operations on predatory journals.” So says the introduction to the book Stinging the Predators: A collection of papers that should never have been published, assembled by Zen Faulkes. Falkes is a […]
“… it is difficult to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough publications to get future jobs.” – so wrote E. Robert Schulman 0f Charlottesville, Virginia, US, in an article for the Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 2, no. 5, 1996, entitled ‘How To Write A Scientific Paper’. The difficulties, it seems, […]
Richard Van Noorden writes, in Nature, about a study published in Science: Researchers feel pressure to cite superfluous papers One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published […]