hunch_net hunch_net-2005 hunch_net-2005-51 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining

51 hunch net-2005-04-01-The Producer-Consumer Model of Research


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Introduction: In the quest to understand what good reviewing is, perhaps it’s worthwhile to think about what good research is. One way to think about good research is in terms of a producer/consumer model. In the producer/consumer model of research, for any element of research there are producers (authors and coauthors of papers, for example) and consumers (people who use the papers to make new papers or code solving problems). An produced bit of research is judged as “good” if it is used by many consumers. There are two basic questions which immediately arise: Is this a good model of research? Are there alternatives? The producer/consumer model has some difficulties which can be (partially) addressed. Disconnect. A group of people doing research on some subject may become disconnected from the rest of the world. Each person uses the research of other people in the group so it appears good research is being done, but the group has no impact on the rest of the world. One way


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 In the quest to understand what good reviewing is, perhaps it’s worthwhile to think about what good research is. [sent-1, score-0.689]

2 One way to think about good research is in terms of a producer/consumer model. [sent-2, score-0.548]

3 In the producer/consumer model of research, for any element of research there are producers (authors and coauthors of papers, for example) and consumers (people who use the papers to make new papers or code solving problems). [sent-3, score-1.309]

4 An produced bit of research is judged as “good” if it is used by many consumers. [sent-4, score-0.468]

5 There are two basic questions which immediately arise: Is this a good model of research? [sent-5, score-0.33]

6 The producer/consumer model has some difficulties which can be (partially) addressed. [sent-7, score-0.337]

7 A group of people doing research on some subject may become disconnected from the rest of the world. [sent-9, score-0.657]

8 Each person uses the research of other people in the group so it appears good research is being done, but the group has no impact on the rest of the world. [sent-10, score-1.272]

9 One way to detect this is by looking at the consumers 2 (the consumers of the consumers) and higher order powers. [sent-11, score-1.432]

10 If the set doesn’t expand much with higher order powers, then there is a disconnect. [sent-12, score-0.27]

11 It is extraordinarily difficult to determine in advance whether a piece of research will have many consumers. [sent-14, score-0.625]

12 A particular piece of work may be useful only after a very long period of time. [sent-15, score-0.31]

13 Self-fulfillment To some extent, interesting research by this definition is simply research presented to the largest possible audience. [sent-17, score-0.896]

14 The odds that someone will build on the research are simply larger when it is presented to a larger audience. [sent-18, score-0.768]

15 Some portion of this effect is “ok”—certainly attempting to educate other people is a good idea. [sent-19, score-0.394]

16 But in judging the value of a piece of research, discounting by the vigor with which it is presented may be healthy for the system. [sent-20, score-0.601]

17 Another important effect is that a reviewer who rejects a paper biases the number of citations a paper later recieves. [sent-25, score-0.591]

18 Another is that a rejected paper that has been resubmitted to another place may change so that it is simply a better paper. [sent-26, score-0.29]

19 Clearly, there are problems with this model for judging research (and at the second order, judgements of reviews of research). [sent-28, score-0.753]

20 However, I am not aware of any other abstract model for “good research” which is even this good. [sent-29, score-0.194]


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tfidf for this blog:

wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)

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