Related papers: An objective criterion for evaluating new physical…
Despite peer-reviewing being an essential component of academia since the 1600s, it has repeatedly received criticisms for lack of transparency and consistency. We posit that recent work in machine learning and explainable AI provide tools…
National research assessment exercises are becoming regular events in ever more countries. The present work contrasts the peer-review and bibliometrics approaches in the conduct of these exercises. The comparison is conducted in terms of…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
Quantifying the impact of a scholarly paper is of great significance, yet the effect of geographical distance of cited papers has not been explored. In this paper, we examine 30,596 papers published in Physical Review C, and identify the…
Constructing the Theory of Everything (TOE) is an elusive goal of today's physics. Goedel's incompleteness theorem seems to forbid physics axiomatization, a necessary part of the TOE. The purpose of this contribution is to show how physics…
The distinctive features of quantum mechanics, which set it apart from other physical theories, challenge our notions of realism. Recovering realism from purely philosophical grounds, a quantitative and operational criterion was proposed in…
Topos theory, a branch of category theory, has been proposed as mathematical basis for the formulation of physical theories. In this article, we give a brief introduction to this approach, emphasising the logical aspects. Each topos serves…
We propose using the technique of weighted citation to measure an article's prestige. The technique allocates a different weight to each reference by taking into account the impact of citing journals and citation time intervals. Weighted…
Focusing specifically on physics periodicals, I show that the journal Impact Factor is not correlated with Hirsch's $h$-index. This implies that the Impact Factor is not a good measure of research quality or influence because the $h$-index…
The conference peer review process involves three constituencies with different objectives: authors want their papers accepted at prestigious venues (and quickly), conferences want to present a program with many high-quality and few…
In this paper I aim to defend one version at least of Hume's dictum: roughly, the idea that possibility is determined by ontology through something like independent variation. My defence is broadly pragmatic, in the sense that adherence to…
Microscopic nuclear theory is based on the tenet that atomic nuclei can be accurately described as collections of point-like nucleons interacting via two- and many-body forces obeying nonrelativistic quantum mechanics -- and the concept of…
In the setting of conference peer review, the conference aims to accept high-quality papers and reject low-quality papers based on noisy review scores. A recent work proposes the isotonic mechanism, which can elicit the ranking of paper…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
The paper reviews and discusses four ideas scattered in previous papers of the author. First, objective properties of quantum systems are not associated with observables but are defined by preparations. Second, measurable results of…
This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community's capacity for…
Journal impact factor (IF) as a gauge of influence and impact of a particular journal comparing with other journals in the same area of research, reports the mean number of citations to the published articles in particular journal.…
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…
Nuclear charge radii constitute a physical observable of growing significance across multiple subdisciplines of physics and related fields. Their determination relies on a combination of complementary experimental techniques and advanced…
For better or for worse, rankings of institutions, such as universities, schools and hospitals, play an important role today in conveying information about relative performance. They inform policy decisions and budgets, and are often…