tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post9078994500931310333..comments2024-03-28T21:32:26.550+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: How modern publication systems exclude the highest quality workBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-26108397268357019232019-02-05T12:17:07.743+00:002019-02-05T12:17:07.743+00:00@d - The journal I used to edit (Medical Hypothese...@d - The journal I used to edit (Medical Hypotheses) was intended for such work in the biomedical field - but it was not successful at the more important job of getting such work 'taken seriously'. <br /><br />It has probably always been hard to get scientific ideas discussed properly (outside of theoretical physics, anyway) since research became professional, because the 'currency' of research is empirical. I can recall trying to discuss such matters over the coffee table with colleagues - but they simply would not (one chap stood up and walked out, commenting that he had *real* science to do!). This distortion has become ridiculous since research funding became the main metric of success. <br /><br />Yet my view was that most of the problems in the fields I worked in were due to wrong ideas - such that nearly all the empirical work was so minsguided as to be without validity. <br /><br />Maybe the clearest example was 'functional brain imaging' - which has generated tens of thousands of papers (and thousands of professorships!) over several decades; yet it is now acknowledged that the results are almost entirely without validity. This was known, on theoretical grounds, from an early stage<br /><br />https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/07/im-feeling-smug-today.html<br /><br />but such critique was unpublishable when it might have done some good; and anyway nobody with power and influence wanted to acknowledge or discuss the problems so long as the funding pipeline was gushing. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-84193606046427283702019-02-05T11:45:49.721+00:002019-02-05T11:45:49.721+00:00The most surprising and ingenious oddity I ever su...The most surprising and ingenious oddity I ever submitted for publication was a lovely piece of theory by one of my research students - he had been so keen to pursue the line of work that I'd used a slush fund to support him while he wrote this perhaps needless extra chapter for his PhD dissertation.<br /><br />It was turned down on doctrinal grounds: "we no longer publish this sort of work". That was a wonderfully obtuse response - it's unlikely that anything resembling it had ever been submitted to that journal or any other. The topic wasn't obviously important but it was fascinating. So it slumbers quietly in a university library, unexposed to the world.<br /><br />deariemenoreply@blogger.com