andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1254 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Bob told me the other day (the other week, actually, as I’m stacking up posts here with a roughly one-month delay) that I shouldn’t try to compete with the electrical engineers when it comes to length of C.V.: according to Bob, these dudes can have over two thousand publications! How do they do it? First, an EE prof will have tons of graduate students and postdocs, they’re all writing papers and presenting at conferences, and they all stick his name on the author list. Second, these students and postdocs write up and publish every experiment they do . Including (especially!) computer experiments. And . . . all these people writing paper cite each other, so they quickly rack up thousands of citations. Upon hearing this, my first reaction to this was fear, plain and simple. One of the distinguishing characteristics of my own research record is that I have so many publications and citations. Those electrical engineers . . . how dare they go around devaluing my currency!
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Bob told me the other day (the other week, actually, as I’m stacking up posts here with a roughly one-month delay) that I shouldn’t try to compete with the electrical engineers when it comes to length of C. [sent-1, score-0.718]
2 : according to Bob, these dudes can have over two thousand publications! [sent-3, score-0.173]
3 First, an EE prof will have tons of graduate students and postdocs, they’re all writing papers and presenting at conferences, and they all stick his name on the author list. [sent-5, score-0.52]
4 Second, these students and postdocs write up and publish every experiment they do . [sent-6, score-0.731]
5 all these people writing paper cite each other, so they quickly rack up thousands of citations. [sent-12, score-0.286]
6 Upon hearing this, my first reaction to this was fear, plain and simple. [sent-13, score-0.16]
7 One of the distinguishing characteristics of my own research record is that I have so many publications and citations. [sent-14, score-0.462]
8 But then I started thinking some more, and I realized that the EE profs’ system is the logical endpoint of some things I’ve actually been trying to do. [sent-19, score-0.261]
9 I advice lots of students and postdocs and would be happy to have more in my orbit. [sent-20, score-0.505]
10 I encourage them to publish early and often and to take the initiative, to themselves write up what they’ve done. [sent-21, score-0.409]
11 If this were all to happen, then, yes, there’d be zillions of publications running around. [sent-22, score-0.313]
12 I’ve done lots of small experiments and analyses that, if I’d written up and published, maybe would be useful to others. [sent-24, score-0.377]
13 We’ll typically do lots of experiments in order to understand our methods, then we only publish a small part of this (all based on our guess of what the journal referees might want to see). [sent-26, score-0.645]
14 Now that we can publish on the web, it’s probably a good idea to publish more. [sent-27, score-0.536]
15 (Even now, such lists, if unstructured, can be difficult to navigate . [sent-32, score-0.125]
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Introduction: Bob told me the other day (the other week, actually, as I’m stacking up posts here with a roughly one-month delay) that I shouldn’t try to compete with the electrical engineers when it comes to length of C.V.: according to Bob, these dudes can have over two thousand publications! How do they do it? First, an EE prof will have tons of graduate students and postdocs, they’re all writing papers and presenting at conferences, and they all stick his name on the author list. Second, these students and postdocs write up and publish every experiment they do . Including (especially!) computer experiments. And . . . all these people writing paper cite each other, so they quickly rack up thousands of citations. Upon hearing this, my first reaction to this was fear, plain and simple. One of the distinguishing characteristics of my own research record is that I have so many publications and citations. Those electrical engineers . . . how dare they go around devaluing my currency!
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Introduction: In our recent discussion of modes of publication, Joseph Wilson wrote, “The single best reform science can make right now is to decouple publication from career advancement, thereby reducing the number of publications by an order of magnitude and then move to an entirely disjointed, informal, online free-for-all communication system for research results.” My first thought on this was: Sure, yeah, that makes sense. But then I got to thinking: what would it really mean to decouple publication from career advancement? This is too late for me—I’m middle-aged and have no career advancement in my future—but it got me thinking more carefully about the role of publication in the research process, and this seemed worth a blog (the simplest sort of publication available to me). However, somewhere between writing the above paragraphs and writing the blog entry, I forgot exactly what I was going to say! I guess I should’ve just typed it all in then. In the old days I just wouldn’t run this
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Introduction: Hey–there’s a whole blog devoted to retractions of journal articles! It’s pretty amazing. Some of it is your basic faked experiments, and then we know about the recent plagiarism example, also there’s an entire research institute in Germany that’s plagiarism-ridden and a journal called Applied Mathematics Letters that apparently will publish just about anything . I’ll publish in crap journals, but nothing that crappy!
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Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: I’ve whined before in this space that some of my most important, innovative, and influential papers are really hard to get published. I’ll go through endless hassle with a journal or sometimes several journals until I find some place willing to publish. It’s just irritating. I was thinking about this recently because a colleague and I just finished a paper that I love love love. But I can’t figure out where to submit it. This is a paper for which I would prefer the so-called reverse-journal-submission approach. Instead of sending the paper to journal after journal after journal, waiting years until an acceptance (recall that, unless you’re Bruno Frey, you’re not allowed to submit the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously), you post the paper on a public site, and then journals compete to see who gets to publish it. I think that system would work well with a paper like this which is offbeat but has a nontrivial chance of becoming highly influential. P.S. Just to clar
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Introduction: Grazia Pittau, Roberto Zelli, and I came out with a paper investigating the role of economic variables in predicting regional disparities in reported life satisfaction of European Union citizens. We use multilevel modeling to explicitly account for the hierarchical nature of our data, respondents within regions and countries, and for understanding patterns of variation within and between regions. Here’s what we found: - Personal income matters more in poor regions than in rich regions, a pattern that still holds for regions within the same country. - Being unemployed is negatively associated with life satisfaction even after controlled for income variation. Living in high unemployment regions does not alleviate the unhappiness of being out of work. - After controlling for individual characteristics and modeling interactions, regional differences in life satisfaction still remain. Here’s a quick graph; there’s more in the article:
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Introduction: Matthew Yglesias links approvingly to the following statement by Michael Mandel: Homeland Security accounts for roughly 90% of the increase in federal regulatory employment over the past ten years. Roughly 90%, huh? That sounds pretty impressive. But wait a minute . . . what if total federal regulatory employment had increased a bit less. Then Homeland Security could’ve accounted for 105% of the increase, or 500% of the increase, or whatever. The point is the change in total employment is the sum of a bunch of pluses and minuses. It happens that, if you don’t count Homeland Security, the total hasn’t changed much–I’m assuming Mandel’s numbers are correct here–and that could be interesting. The “roughly 90%” figure is misleading because, when written as a percent of the total increase, it’s natural to quickly envision it as a percentage that is bounded by 100%. There is a total increase in regulatory employment that the individual agencies sum to, but some margins are p
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