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Sunday, April 05, 2009
Research vs. Papers
Computer scientist Luis von Ahn* argues that the writing of papers is an enemy to research. Some of his post is specific to the conventions of computer science, and some is not, e.g.:
As an academic community, it sometimes feels that the final goal of doing research is publishing papers. The goal of doing research should be, well, doing research. I understand that communicating the results of our work is important, but surely there is a better method than one that was invented before computers were around. . . . there is an insane number of papers written every year, the vast majority of which contribute very little (or not at all) to our collective knowledge. This is basically spam.
Hat-tip to darlo at Academic Productivity.
*You may never have heard of von Ahn, but you’ve encountered at least one bit of his work, the captcha; he invented it.
Comments
This is especially egregious in computer science, where the same idea will be turned into ten similar papers. (The upside is that if one of the papers is unavailable because it was published in a paywalled journal, you can just read one of the other nine.)