RE: [Fis] Consilience: Writing on the Clouds

Pedro wrote:
> ---how research becomes development and innovation.
> Contemporary societies, are loudly demanding that the clouds,
> both nationally and internationally, produce a lot of
> descends ("rain")...

In fact, now that everyone has become aware of these citation networks, the
researchers and academics are evaluated purely through "citation analysis",
numbers of publications, and other quantitative metrics. What this causes is
unprecedented mass-production of papers that nobody bothers to read. The
gems are forever lost in the masses of "scores". Yet, without quantity, it's
hard to survive, especially for those just starting.

Let me describe a story about Google and PageRank (again). Initially, the
internet search engines sought the pages that had many keywords the searcher
listed in the query. It worked quite well at first. But then the
unscrupulous realized that they can boost their pages up the ranks by
putting the crucial keywords many many times in white text on white
background. Google outwitted these charlatans by looking at the "citations"
of the pages: trusted sources would propagate quality to the pages they
cited. But this system is now too under assault, with "ghost" communities
that point at one another and try to get pointed at by accident or through a
scheme by someone whom Google assigned some credence.

You might be aware of "ghost" journals, "ghost" "interdisciplinary"
multi-conferences at popular tourist spots, whose only purpose is the score.
You might have read various pieces of uninformed nonsense that managed to
get smuggled by the editors' eyes into fancy journals. Of course, one can
analyze the clouds to find circles of empty vapor, too. Loet?

The unscrupulous will seek to undermine any system of assigning relevance.
What counts is not the vapor but the rain. The sad thing is that it often
takes a very long time, and vapor from much sweat before the rain comes.

Aleks

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Received on Fri Nov 26 13:09:27 2004