

A Flurry of Copycats on PubMed - beefman
http://blog.thegrandlocus.com/2014/10/a-flurry-of-copycats-on-pubmed

======
jldugger
A friend of mine reached out to me via LinkedIn several months ago, stating he
could probably use Tableau and some public datasets to DDoS the medical peer
review system and earn tenure at the same time: low impact factor * a million
is still going to be a lot better than the alternative. Sadly, I didn't hear
anything terribly insightful when I asked him about spurious correlations and
data mining as a perjorative term, so I left that one alone, and I assume he
doesn't have the balls to go through with it since you know, there are actual
people in the tenure committee who have to review your CV.

One angle that isn't quite clear to me from the article; if you build a system
to harvest datasets, find correlations, and push them through a set of
templates with conditional subtemplates based on saliency, with correct
citations of source data to produce a single article, is it wrong to put your
name on it? And if you do 30 of them?

Obviously selling your naming rights to papers harms both the community who
might wish follow up with the authors on scholarship, and those who use peer
reviewed publications as a filter. But I think the real lesson here might just
be that abusing the university administration's institutional data analysis
platform to game your tenure case seems like a waste of time in comparison to
selling one weak article a day for 10,000 bucks.

------
nn3
Good example of Cambell's law.

Doesn't seem much worse than the senior professor in western departments who
automatically gets co-authorship on everything his department produces.

Publication indexes are just very sick metrics.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive)

------
jrapdx3
Though I use PubMed frequently, can't say I've encountered "copycat" articles.
It's disheartening to find out what has been happening, but perhaps not a huge
surprise to the extent publication becomes merely a commodity to accumulate in
order to further an academic career.

It does prompt me to keep an eye out for such occurrence. But I'm pretty sure
not every researcher goes about things that way. Maybe it depends on the field
of research. The topics of interest to me could simply be too obscure to
attract that kind of attention.

Sure seems if anything can be done with computing technology, it will be done.
What sort of future awaits us? We humans always seem to do until we overdo
then redo it all over again, it doesn't ever end.

