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by raziel2701
848 days ago
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Science communication must be at an all-time low. I initially thought the paper was about a sea-borne pathogen being responsible for a decline in disruptiveness in science, which is a crazy statement. Then I thought that it was a paper claiming that a bug in the seaborn plotting library in python was responsible for the decline in disruptiveness in science, which is absurd! Finally I understood, that this is a paper that is debunking another meta paper that claimed that disruptiveness in science had declined. And this new, arxiv paper is showing that a bug in the seaborn plotting library is responsible for the mistake in the analysis that led to that widely publicized conclusion about declining disruptiveness in science. oh boy so many levels... |
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ETA: For those who don’t click through, the paper title is “Dataset Artefacts are the Hidden Drivers of the Declining Disruptiveness in Science.” The first few sentences of the abstract are:
“Park et al. [1] reported a decline in the disruptiveness of scientific and technological knowledge over time. Their main finding is based on the computation of CD indices, a measure of disruption in citation networks [2], across almost 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents. Due to a factual plotting mistake, database entries with zero references were omitted in the CD index distributions, hiding a large number of outliers with a maximum CD index of one, while keeping them in the analysis [1].”