74 Comments

I am rowan atkinson. I am agree with you. Hi Robin,

First of all, thanks for your comment on my site (how did you find it by the way).Second, I agree with you that blogs should be treated more seriously by the academias. The hyperlinks do make blogs a great tool for academic research.What I am saying in my post is to abandon the instrumental way of treating blogs.------------------------------------------------------------------------rowanat01

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I've been looking around www.overcomingbias.com and actually am impressed by the amazing content material here. I work the nightshift at my job and it is so boring. I've been coming here for the previous couple nights and reading. I simply needed to let you know that I have been enjoying what I've seen and I look forward to reading more.

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Sometimes it's really that simple, isn't it? I feel a little stupid for not thinking of this myself/earlier, though.

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You are of course absolutely correct that what gets measured gets managed. If we start counting mentions in acknoledgements then people will stroll for those as they now stroll for citations.JUst be more open for those things.

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always check the spellings! hehe

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post alcoholism,

Including apparently to generate neologisms, e.g. "co-evoluting" and "acamedic." Does the latter refer to medical schools? :-)

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Hi Robin,

First of all, thanks for your comment on my site (how did you find it by the way).Second, I agree with you that blogs should be treated more seriously by the academias. The hyperlinks do make blogs a great tool for academic research.What I am saying in my post is to abandon the instrumental way of treating blogs. As Whitehead remarks, human beings are co-evoluting with technology. The unique styles and features of blogs to some extent re-configure acamedic writing.

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Nathan,

That was what I was working my way towards. You definitely put it more clearly.

Barkley,

You are of course absolutely correct that what gets measured gets managed. If we start counting mentions in acknoledgements then people will troll for those as they now troll for citations. (By the way, when trolling for citations as a referee, I do try to keep it under control, and bury the suggestions in a list of others, if for no other reason than to avoid making it too obvious that I was the referee. :-)

Outcast,

You make a neat point. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we could discount citations by the closeness of the citee to the citer (perhaps measured by cross cites), or at least add double count cites from fields outside the field in which the paper was published.

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Whatever the truth of Barkley's jibes he rudely raises a point central to the subjectis of this blog. People being highly biased in favor of their friends is very common phenomenon, and perhaps the biggest source of bias of them all. To what extent the "lunch bloggers" are yet another among billions of examples of this I have no personal knowledge and it would be a good idea to use examples in which this community is less personally involved.

In the academic world some bias in favor of friends and close colleagues is of necessity since the language talked by subgroups is so alien they are mutually unintelligible for the most part. They thus must either cite things they don't very well understand or stick to their own little highly biased and highly obscure (to all but themselves) clique. As long as cites by friends count as strongly as cites by strangeers there will remain a very strong incentive to carry on this cite barter among mutually trusting friends, even though such cites indicate social connection rather than anything we should consider to be academic achievement.

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Robin,

I'll let it go, and will note that I have turned it into mostly teasing, which is largely my attitude towards it. However, it is not just you. All of you have indeed been praising each other to the skies on your respective blogs. The "most brilliant" is you, after all, not so described by yourself (whew).

Certainly you all have a right to do so, and I shall say no more about it, at least not in this venue (I do apologize for having overdone it here). But since you seem to be bothered by my appearance of being bothered by it (which I am not, really, I have been teasing, as I know most of you), you might just ask yourself how it looks to anybody like me who has actually been paying reasonably close attention.

BTW, I think you are the one with the whitest teeth... :-).

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Barkley, since this is the forth time you have brought this up, it apparently really really bugs you that I offered a few parenthetical words of praise for my colleagues. You've made your point; can we get on with other topics now?

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I think that ever since internet lists got going seriously over a decade, largely to be supplanted more recently by blogging, there has been a lot of research stimulated by the discussions on the internet more broadly. But I think Nathan Whitehead's remarks are probably more the way things go.

I can't resist this bit of naught wisecracking. In watching the mutual backscratching and citations of the GMU lunch bloggers crowd, I am beginning to get the impression of a high school about to put out a yearbook. So, any minute I expect one to call another "class clown," and another will be described as "having the whitest teeth," and, gosh, we might read that another "was most likely to get his hair cut when his mother told him to in the third grade," while yet another might be "most likely to save a damsel in distress in a dank dungeon guarded by a demonic dragon.":-).

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Among me and my friends, grad students in CS about to get our PhDs, it is very common to communicate important ideas in blog posts and comments. It seems to be the general consensus that one does not cite blog posts directly but treats it as "out of band" information relative to published work.

For example, a friend might put some random thoughts about what they're doing in their research in a blog post. I might notice something and comment on it, after which a discussion ensues. When they go to write up the idea, they might ask me to be a coauthor and collaborate (option 1). Or, they might say something like "thanks to X and Y for discussing early versions of this idea with us" in the acknowledgments (option 2). If I like their idea and decide to write a paper, I would first ask the original blogger if they wanted to be coauthor. Otherwise I would say something like "this work was inspired by a comment by X, to whom we are indebted" in the acknowledgments (option 3). With options 2 and 3, it would also be appropriate to have a URL listed so the reader can go back to see the discussion (if the blog still exists), but it would not be required.

I think the philosophical basis of this system is that blog posts and comments are "published" but not archived reliably. Blog posts don't cite all their references so they should not expect to be cited the same way as academic papers. I think the key thing is giving people credit, which is always easy to do. My friends and I don't expect citations on our blog posts, but we do expect that other people won't be jerks and write up our ideas without saying we came up with them.

The exceptions to this style would be specific things like a long well thought out blog essay by someone that doesn't publish within academia. In this case referencing the post would be a full citation with URL and date. The argument here is that the post is not "out of band" communication during academic discourse, but rather is primary source material.

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Adrian,

Whatever counts starts to get gamed. Given the definitely increasing focus on citations at several levels, there becomes increasing pressures by authors on others to cite them. As a journal editor I regularly see referees telling authors to "cite me here, cite me there, cite me over there and under the mud puddle!" etc., to the point of absolute nausea, although on occasion such requests are justified (they are usually more effective if they are limited to one or two references and are buried in a longer list of other appropriate additional things that should be cited, just to give you all out there a tip).

Needless to say, if blog post citations actually start to "count," we shall probably see a much greater expansion of the sort of thing that the GMU bloggers lunch crowd does, that is regularly praising each other in their respective blogs for being "the most brilliant," "the most insightful," etc. etc., although I think with them they actually believe it, as I think they view their lunch table as the new Athenian agora.

JMG3Y,

Yes, pretty grim. In econ, there is not quite as much pressure on grants and funding as in the hard sciences because, except for the experimental crowd, there is less need to keep labs funded, which is a big deal of course. Of course, in any discipline an ability to get outside money is always a plus, and at the top institutions in econ a failure to do so is certainly going to count heavily against one (grad students need to be supported, even if labs don't generally), with only a serious list of pubs in the very highest journals, with plenty of accompanying impressive citations getting one off that particular hook.

The end of that is that, ironically, in econ it is probably less absolutely "all about $$$," although $$$ certainly speaks louder than words in pretty much any discipline.

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There is that old joke that administrators can't read but they can count. And count they must, using objective rather than subjective measures. They are under increasing pressure to bring in the "indirect" dollars to run the institution. Administrators are forced to pay at least lip service to supporting the broad definition of scholarship, liberal undergraduate education, collaboration and academic service but team success is repeatedly landing extramural grant funding.

"Hard science" departments are often explicit about the requirements for tenure - at least XX first author (or second author to your grad student) papers in refereed journals and at least $X00,000 of extramural research funding. Miss getting that NIH R01 on three rounds (currently ~20% first submission success rate) and a new tenure-track faculty member is likely done because even if they land one later, they likely won't get enough papers over the critical hurdle of acceptance for them to be counted. Elite institutions hire several tenure track assistant professors, telling them that only one of you will get tenure here but the rest of you will most likely be able to move into tenured positions at lower ranked institutions elsewhere.

All this makes for an intensely competitive environment, all the way from the inter-institutional to the college to the department to the individual level, bringing out the full range of behaviors that humans manifest in competition. Faking, stealing and so on. Rumors, not frequent, of papers being held up so the reviewer can get their out on the same topic or stealing an idea from a grant proposal that they anonymously reviewed. Special earmarks through legislation to avoid the competitive government grant funding process.

In the end it all boils down to $$$ and the ability to attract them, a critical component of which is a consistent record of publishing the results from previous awards in journals that are well regarded by ones peers who will be reviewing one's proposals for that next award. IMO blogs in this environment likely provide the same function as the after conference session bar talk but in a faster and more public way. Both are very useful but not for citation.

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Barkley,

I agree that these things happen. However, my point is that blogs may come to complement citations. Citations are just a form of recognition of you and your work. Blogs can be a way of getting you, your ideas, and your work known more widely so if the sort of thing you mentioned occurs, you have alternatives. Note that in the example you mentioned, the original cites and letters didn't protect the candidate, they simply helped them get another job. Same with blogs. To throw in an anecdote, I know of a case where someone was turned down for tenure (I didn't see the letters so I cannot comment on the nominal merits), but landed a good job, with tenure. I do know that blogging helped cement the job offer for the individual involved and even positively influenced the money offered. That's what I mean about credit.

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