Related papers: On the rules of science game
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly applied to scientific research, but its benefits remain unevenly distributed across different communities and disciplines. While technical challenges such as limited data, fragmented…
Systematic evaluations of publicly funded research typically employ a combination of bibliometrics and peer review, but it is not known whether the bibliometric component introduces biases. This article compares three alternative mechanisms…
Errors quoted on results are often given in asymmetric form. An account is given of the two ways these can arise in an analysis, and the combination of asymmetric errors is discussed. It is shown that the usual method has no basis and is…
Collaboration among scholars has emerged as a significant characteristic of contemporary science. As a result, the number of authors listed in publications continues to rise steadily. Unfortunately, determining the authors to be included in…
Bibliometrics offers a particular representation of science. Through bibliometric methods a bibliometrician will always highlight particular elements of publications, and through these elements operationalize particular representations of…
The AI ethics of statistical fairness is an error, the approach should be abandoned, and the accumulated academic work deleted. The argument proceeds by identifying four recurring mistakes within statistical fairness. One conflates fairness…
Variance in predictions across different trained models is a significant, under-explored source of error in fair binary classification. In practice, the variance on some data examples is so large that decisions can be effectively arbitrary.…
The ongoing globalisation of science has undisputedly a major impact on how and where scientific research is being conducted nowadays. Yet, the big picture remains blurred. It is largely unknown where this process is heading, and at which…
Bibliographic metrics are commonly utilized for evaluation purposes within academia, often in conjunction with other metrics. These metrics vary widely across fields and change with the seniority of the scholar; consequently, the only way…
Scientific publishing systematically filters out negative results. We argue that this long-standing asymmetry has become an urgent problem in the era of large language models, which inherit the positive bias of the literature they are…
The demand for global university league tables has been high over the past two decades. However, significant criticism of their methodologies is accumulating without being addressed. I revisit global university league tables by normalizing…
This article shows how the Universities and higher education and research institutions obey more and more to criteria of profitability and effectiveness, following the example of the industry. The Universities and the academic communities…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
When a student fails an exam, do we tend to blame their effort or the test's difficulty? Attribution, defined as how reasons are assigned to event outcomes, shapes perceptions, reinforces stereotypes, and influences decisions. Attribution…
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…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
The large amount of information contained in bibliographic databases has recently boosted the use of citations, and other indicators based on citation numbers, as tools for the quantitative assessment of scientific research. Citations…
Academic and scientific publishing practices have changed significantly in recent years. This paper presents an analysis of 17 million research papers published since 2000 to explore changes in authorship and content practices. It shows a…
Deep metric learning papers from the past four years have consistently claimed great advances in accuracy, often more than doubling the performance of decade-old methods. In this paper, we take a closer look at the field to see if this is…