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by kragen
745 days ago
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those criticisms are from people who think that publishers and reviewers should evaluate scientific papers, when obviously the right way to evaluate papers is by the larger research community over the course of many years. worse, many of the criticisms are from institutions that are attempting to use bibliometrics for hiring and tenure decisions, which is an obviously stupid idea most papers are worthless, but when they are first written, it is too early to tell which ones they are; of course reviewers' suggestions are often helpful in improving the quality of a paper, but they cannot improve a worthless paper into a groundbreaking one pre-publication peer review was instituted mostly in the mid-twentieth century and should be regarded as a failed experiment belonging to the age of paper. most peer-reviewed papers are worthless, and peer review often serves merely to retard progress most of the papers i see on mdpi are mediocre, but some are useful, and it certainly isn't vixra-style garbage |
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It is obtuse to think that a few people can read a paper and know it's validity. It's falsifiable but even that's fuzzy. The problem then comes down to the incentive structures. Why do people cheat? Because we're lazy evaluators. It's odd to me that we won't read the works of peers in a department, lab, whatever. But doing that would be a much stronger form of evaluation than anything that could be inferred from citations, h-index, conference ranking, etc. Plus, the structure is to push novelty fast and frequently. That's not only not possible but ignores a fundamental aspect of science: reproducibility.
But this also doesn't mean there aren't scam publishers and publishers scammers prefer. But I'd say that those are a result of the former issue. Because metrics are not being treated as guides. It's just Goodhart's Law in action.