Great post, Larry.

And to emphasize the point the BBC website is today carrying a story on Mary Cartwright:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21713163 

whose work during WWII led to the foundations of chaos theory. Freeman Dyson is quoted in the article as suggesting that her work took a generation to be appreciated:

"Freeman Dyson maintains that this is a classic example of the way in which real mathematical originality and innovation is missed until a generation after the work has been done..".

Cheers,

Nigel 

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Hi all,

This post is about a piece on mathbabe's blog and it concerns a study of 
journal ranking and its impact in science, jocularly called "Deep 
Impact". Here is the link to mathbabe's post.

http://mathbabe.org/2013/03/08/unintended-consequences-of-journal-ranking/

I have also included a copy of the article she is talking about as an 
attachment for convenience in case you wish to peruse the source. The 
reference section is quite long.

Mathbabe, aka Cathy O'Neil, summarizes the research but the gist of the 
piece is that there have been incredibly few scientific or statistical 
studies where the conclusions drawn use the data relevant to it. I don't 
find this surprising, as in the UK, this has become nothing more than an 
ideological stick to beat university workers with. Unsurprisingly, the 
authors have discovered that using such tools as this to assess 
scientific work to be bad practice. It certainly isn't scientific. The 
impact of a journal or an article in many fields may take as long as ten 
years to have a significant impact, particularly if it is original. It 
certainly isn't within the time frame used by government.

Another point made by the authors is the incidence of what others have 
called scientific fraud. These others have focused on the collusion of 
some of the journals in this -- especially those that don't regulate 
their content very well. Some journals refuse to retract articles even 
if it has been found to be fraudulent. One of the conclusions the 
authors reach is that the entire publishing model needs to be reformed. 
This will not be a surprise to many of you.

The authors didn't study the refereeing process. A number of senior 
academics, mathematicians being among the most involved, contend that 
the process has become virtually completely corrupted and they now 
refuse to either publish in certain journals or publish in any of them 
at all, preferring to publish in an arXive. Some of them unsurprisingly 
are also open access activists.

At the end of her post, where she notes that the authors advocate a new 
kind of publishing platform, she provides a link to the Episciences 
Project, which is an undertaking to take commercial publishers out of 
the publishing loop without sacrificing sound peer review and do it at 
low cost (although the server costs are not small). The Episciences 
Project is based at Cornell, but there are similar projects in Germany 
and France.


Happy reading,

larry

Dr L Brownstein
[Alt-e] [log in to unmask]

Review Editor
Radical Statistics

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