

 Iran showing fastest scientific growth of any country  - prat
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18546-iran-showing-fastest-scientific-growth-of-any-country.html

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ronnier
"Fastest growing" is usually an annoying statistic. It's really meaningless.
Say Germany produced 100,000 scientific studies last year, and this year
produced 150,000 studies, they grew at 50%. If Iran produced 1,000 studies
last year and this year produced 2,000, they now have a 100% growth, capturing
the "fastest growing" title.

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rriepe
Measuring the amount of papers is questionable as well. One paper with a
ridiculous breakthrough (cold fusion, etc) could outweigh all the others.

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ronnier
Having gone through graduate school, I've seen my share of nonsense papers
created just to have a topic for a thesis.

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siavosh
Same here, one of the reasons I quit my phd program. I saw how much of the
publication volume is bs--it's really hard and rare to produce a meaningful
research paper, and that rarity will only increase.

If you go to a top cs conference, chances are 80% of the papers are throw-
away...literally no one will read other than the reviewers, and I'm talking
about top-conferences let alone the countless lesser known ones. And to be
honest, a lot of emerging countries seem to be mass producing a lot of low
quality papers in CS, and it's flooding the field. One reason might be how
cheap it is to fund a cs research project as opposed to an experimental
physics or bio lab.

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axiom
Papers are about as good an indicator of productive output as lines of code.

As mentioned briefly in the article, citations are probably a much better
metric.

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prat
that's too much oversimplification.. moreover there is, if any, a inverse
correlation between lines of code and productive output. not so with papers,

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Aron
I find it unhelpful when a single questionable statistic is used to support a
complicated thesis. In these cases, it would be better to listen to experts
whose opinion is based on a significantly more complicated set of criteria. In
that case we still have to judge the quality of the expert, but perhaps if
that seems daunting as well then we should perhaps consider ourselves unable
to judge the answer at all. I find that more appealing than walking away with
a certainty of opinion on the subject of this article.

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ivankirigin
Iran can only accept any associated prize if it first demonstrates how such
statistics are unscientific.

