Related papers: Conduct and Correctness in Mathematical Publishing
This report is the first of two publications of a joint Working Group of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM). In it, we shall analyze the current state of…
In this note I describe reliability standards for writing and reviewing mathematical papers; these standards are (in my opinion) vital for the progress of mathematics. I give examples of applying the described or other reliability…
Scientific publishing is in a transition between the old paper-bound, static forms and the new electronic media with its interactive, dynamic possibilities. This takes place in the context of imploding library budgets and exploding magazine…
In benchmarking international research, although publication and citation analyses should not be used to compare different disciplines, scientometrists frequently fail to resist the temptation to present rankings based on total publications…
The academic publishing world is changing significantly, with ever-growing numbers of publications each year and shifting publishing patterns. However, the metrics used to measure academic success, such as the number of publications,…
Credit allocation in the mainstream bibliometrics is fundamentally flawed and the popular indicators have been misleading science for decades. Originally a simple technical mistake has become an integral part of our culture and is very…
The growing disconnection of the majority of population from mathematics is becoming a phenomenon that is increasingly difficult to ignore. This paper attempts to point to deeper roots of this cultural and social phenomenon. It concentrates…
Mathematical modelling and ethics have more touching points than most of us would like to admit. Everyday decisions are often reasoned by mathematical arguments. Mathematics teachers belong to those mathematically literate, who must point…
Over the past few decades, the rate of publication retractions has increased dramatically in academia. In this study, we investigate retractions from a quantitative perspective, aiming to answer two fundamental questions. One, how do…
Purpose. In this study, we want to identify current possible causes for citing and referencing errors in scholarly literature to compare if something changed from the snapshot provided Sweetland in his 1989 paper.…
Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
In science and beyond, numbers are omnipresent when it comes to justifying different kinds of judgments. Which scientific author, hiring committee-member, or advisory board panelist has not been confronted with page-long "publication…
Plagiarism is the representation of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. In educational contexts, there are differing definitions of plagiarism depending on the institution. Prominent…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…
Publications proposing novel machine learning methods are often primarily rated by exhibited predictive performance on selected problems. In this position paper we argue that predictive performance alone is not a good indicator for the…
The statistics community, which has traditionally lacked a transparent and open peer-review system, faces a challenge of inconsistent paper quality, with some published work containing substantial errors. This problem resonates with…
Scientific publications form the cornerstone of innovation and have maintained a stable growth trend over the years. However, in recent years, there has been a significant surge in retractions, driven largely by the proliferation of…
Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, heavily relied on throughout vast swathes of finance, commerce, industry, academia and Government. They are also acknowledged to be extraordinarily and unacceptably prone to error. If these two points are…
Failures of retraction are common in science. Why do these failures occur? And, relatedly, what makes findings harder or easier to retract? We use data from Microsoft Academic Graph, Retraction Watch, and Altmetric -- including retracted…