Related papers: On the rules of science game
There is demand from science funders, industry, and the public that science should become more risk-taking, more out-of-the-box, and more interdisciplinary. Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers…
Systems incorporating biometric technologies have become ubiquitous in personal, commercial, and governmental identity management applications. Both cooperative (e.g. access control) and non-cooperative (e.g. surveillance and forensics)…
This essay, written by a statistician and a climate scientist, describes our view of the gap that exists between current practice in mainstream climate science, and the practical needs of policymakers charged with exploring possible…
The concept of complexity appears in virtually all areas of knowledge. Its intuitive meaning shares similarities across fields, but disagreements between its details hinders a general definition, leading to a plethora of proposed…
Universality or near-universality of citation distributions was found empirically a decade ago but its theoretical justification has been lacking so far. Here, we systematically study citation distributions for different disciplines in…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
Algorithmic and data bias are gaining attention as a pressing issue in popular press - and rightly so. However, beyond these calls to action, standard processes and tools for practitioners do not readily exist to assess and address unfair…
In recent paper "Quantifying Inequities and Documenting Elitism in PhD-granting Mathematical Sciences Departments in the United States" (arXiv:2308.13750) by a group of accomplished and/or aspiring mathematicians, the authors use data to…
Global science is often portrayed as a unified system of shared knowledge and open exchange. Yet this vision contrasts with emerging evidence that scientific recognition is uneven and increasingly fragmented along regional and cultural…
A specific theoretical framework is important for designing and conducting an experiment, and for interpretation of its results. The field of gravitational physics is expanding, and more clarity is needed. It appears that some popular…
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
Reproducibility is an important feature of science; experiments are retested, and analyses are repeated. Trust in the findings increases when consistent results are achieved. Despite the importance of reproducibility, significant work is…
The concept of Science 2.0 was introduced almost a decade ago to describe the new generation of online-based tools for researchers allowing easier data sharing, collaboration and publishing. Although technically sound, the concept still…
Over the past two decades, biometric recognition has exploded into a plethora of different applications around the globe. This proliferation can be attributed to the high levels of authentication accuracy and user convenience that biometric…
Algorithmic systems have been used to inform consequential decisions for at least a century. Recidivism prediction dates back to the 1920s. Automated credit scoring dates began in the middle of the last century, but the last decade has…
We present empirical data on misprints in citations to twelve high-profile papers. The great majority of misprints are identical to misprints in articles that earlier cited the same paper. The distribution of the numbers of misprint…
The ascent of scaling in artificial intelligence research has revolutionized the field over the past decade, yet it presents significant challenges for academic researchers, particularly in computational social science and critical…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
The starting point of this paper is a desktop research assessment model that does not take properly into account the complexities of research assessment, but rather bases itself on a series of highly simplifying, questionable assumptions…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…