Related papers: Conduct and Correctness in Mathematical Publishing
We describe various errors in the mathematical literature, and consider how some of them might have been avoided, or at least detected at an earlier stage, using tools such as Maple or Sage. Our examples are drawn from three broad…
The extensive focus on performance indicators in research evaluation has been facing critique in science studies. Stemming from a neoliberalist paradigm, metrics allegedly objectify and create certainty about researchers' performance. This…
Despite the effort put into the detection of academic plagiarism, it continues to be a ubiquitous problem spanning all disciplines. Various tools have been developed to assist human inspectors by automatically identifying suspicious…
Despite having an important role supporting assessment processes, criticism towards evaluation systems and the categorizations used are frequent. Considering the acceptance by the scientific community as an essential issue for using…
One might have hoped that the immediacy and completeness of scientific information provided through the internet would have made the wrongful appropriation of someone else's ideas --now so easy to detect and document-- a sin of the past.…
Computer programs do not always work as expected. In fact, ominous warnings about the desperate state of the software industry continue to be released with almost ritualistic regularity. In this paper, we look at the 60 years history of…
The SLAM community has fallen into a "Confidence Trap" by prioritizing benchmark scores over principled uncertainty estimation. This yields systems that are geometrically accurate but probabilitistically inconsistent and brittle. We…
Good problems grab us. They invite us to find patterns, make conjectures, and prove-or perhaps disprove-a conjecture. When I first taught, I saw my work as tantalizing students with structures just beyond their reach, so that I could elicit…
This work provides a critical examination of the most popular bibliometric indicators and methodologies to assess the research performance of individuals and institutions. The aim is to raise the fog and make practitioners more aware of the…
Rigour is crucial for scientific research as it ensures the reproducibility and validity of results and findings. Despite its importance, little work exists on modelling rigour computationally, and there is a lack of analysis on whether…
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. (source unclear) Machine learning and deep learning are the technologies of the day for developing intelligent automatic systems. However, a key hurdle for…
Electronic publishing opportunities, manifested today in a variety of electronic journals and Web-based compendia, have captured the imagination of many scholars. These opportunities have also destabilized norms about the character of…
A social norm defines what is good and what is bad in social contexts, as well as what to do based on such assessments. A stable social norm should be maintained against errors committed by its players. In addition, individuals may have…
The volume of scientific manuscripts is growing faster than the capacity to evaluate them, yet the institutions that govern peer review have remained largely unchanged. The result is a widening mismatch: reviewer scarcity, noisier…
Causal models and methods have great promise, but their progress has been stalled. Proposals using causality get squeezed between two opposing worldviews. Scientific perfectionism--an insistence on only using "correct" models--slows the…
The editorial handling of papers in scientific journals as a human activity process is considered. Using recently proposed approaches of human dynamics theory we examine the probability distributions of random variables reflecting the…
"I am an industrial mathematician." When asked to identify my profession or academic field of study, this is the most concise answer I can provide. However, this seemingly straightforward statement is commonly greeted by a blank stare or an…
With a folk understanding that political polarization refers to socio-political divisions within a society, many have proclaimed that we are more divided than ever. In this account, polarization has been blamed for populism, the erosion of…
The established language for statistical testing --- significance levels, power, and p-values --- is overly complicated and deceptively conclusive. Even teachers of statistics and scientists who use statistics misinterpret the results of…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in empirical research workflows, their use as analytical tools for quantitative or qualitative data raises pressing concerns for scientific integrity. This opinion paper draws a…