Related papers: What is research?
In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
This contribution examines the current controversy over research productivity. There are two sides in this controversy. Using extensive data from several industries and areas of research, one side argues that research productivity is…
This paper examines the processes involved in attempting to capture the subtlest aspects of nature by the scientific method and argues on this basis that nature is fundamentally elusive and may resist grasping by the methods of science. If…
The last few years have seen the proliferation of measures that quantify the scientific output of researches. Yet, these measures focus on productivity, thus fostering the "publish or perish" paradigm. This article proposes a measure that…
This article describes epistemological distinctions between science and history. Science investigates models of natural law using repeatable experiments as the ultimate arbiter. In contrast, history investigates past events by considering…
There is growing concern over the potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Publishing scientific research can facilitate misuse of the technology, but the research can also contribute to protections against misuse. This…
National science systems have become embedded in global science and countries do everything they can to harness global knowledge to national economic needs. However, accessing and using the riches of global knowledge can occur only through…
In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that…
Cancer research reflects an implicit conflict. On the one hand, there is an overwhelming desire to control the disease. We all wish that. On the other hand, we would like to understand why cancer follows so many clearly defined yet puzzling…
Consider the day when an invariant mass peak, roughly compatible with "the Higgs", begins to emerge, say at the LHC, ... and may you see that day. There will be a difference between discovery and scrutiny. The latter would involve an effort…
This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in…
We discuss whether science is in the process of being transformed from a quest for causality to a quest for correlation in light of the recent development in artificial intelligence. We observe that while a blind trust in the most seductive…
Power index research has been a very active field in the last decades. Will this continue or are all the important questions solved? We argue that there are still many opportunities to conduct useful research with and on power indices.…
I will propose a new way of advancing white dwarf research. Open science is a method of doing research that lets everyone who has something to say about the subject take part in the problem solving process. Already now, the amount of…
Most work on scholarly document processing assumes that the information processed is trustworthy and factually correct. However, this is not always the case. There are two core challenges, which should be addressed: 1) ensuring that…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Process science is a highly interdisciplinary field of research. Despite numerous proposals, process science lacks an adequate understanding of the core concepts of the field, including notions such as process, event, and system. A more…
Time is one of those issues about which many thinkers and scientists have tried to pronounce their finest thoughts, but the discourse about time has remained vague and often inconsistent. In this paper we put forward a conceptual framework…
The way science is currently practiced shows conclusions but hides how they were reached. Researchers work privately, polish their results, publish a finished paper, and defend it. Errors are punished by retraction rather than corrected by…