Item — HN Reader

In one of the neurology labs I was in at UCLA, I saw the same exact thing: publishing tons of garbage and not doing real science. There were some professors of higher integrity, but the PIs that were doing the garbage publishing were getting millions of dollars.

One of my PIs, who was doing this, had a term for his publishing strategy: "salami publishing". You try to cut as thinly as possible your research and publish as many papers on it as you can. That's actually less harmful than the real problem which is that the papers were just rubbish and people in the lab seemed to all kind of know, but disliked discussing it.

5 comments

Yup, the circle-jerk is strong.

My PI at Janelia once dismissed a proposal I had for an 'unsexy' but pragmatic tool that probably everyone in the building would have used. I was told it would 'do nothing for his career'.

That was pretty depressing.

The official term is MPU - minimal publishable unit.

Do we need an anonymous but authenticated web of trust system for analyzing/debunking papers? Is it apparent to those in the field that these results are low quality / junk science?

How does one detect junk science paper other than being skilled enough to have produced the bad science if the first place?

It’s definitely apparent to those in the field. All the good scientists know who publishes junk, even if the junk publishers are unaware. Arjun Raj has a great and relevant blog post on playing the long game in science: http://rajlaboratory.blogspot.com/2016/06/reproducibility-re.... Worth a read.

Is "salami publishing" even harmful at all? Isn't a larger number of smaller papers analagous to a larger number of smaller modules in software?

I don't think the analogy is valid. To be honest I hate it when I encounter a researcher who seems to be taking this strategy.

Large parts of these papers are boilerplate or duplicated between papers. This wastes the time of the reader even if they try to identify where the new parts are. Plus, the papers are published in 5 different journals or conferences and might not even cite each other, so you often aren't even aware of all of the pieces.

In my opinion, the whole idea of "papers" isn't going to stay. Papers was a way to share information when internet didn't exist. In a future, researching agents (most probably AI or robots) will "chat" and "argue" to each others, building fact and fact-checking each other sentences.

It would basically be the classical reviewing process in real time on every sentences.

In my opinion, "salami" papers go in that direction. Facts, premises and results are decoupled to more units, which can be independently claimed and proved.

I agree we need to move to a more continuous approach. We should constantly update a (digital) model of our understanding of a topic, and each (attempted) update should reevaluate against all existing cases.

Current papers are too fragmented, and primarily accumulate knowledge in those humans that actively participate in the field. By them reading the papers, evaluating and combining them. To transfer that knowledge to someone new is a process measuring in multiple years (ie a PhD). And when a person then ultimately exits their field, a lot of the accumulated understanding is lost.

Great points. I agree that a more granular approach would be better. But I think "salami" papers are too poorly implemented at present.

As a compromise in the meantime, it might be better to encourage more short papers which avoid the boilerplate parts. This would make salami slicing your papers more acceptable as you wouldn't be expected to write a full length paper, which encourages salami slicers to pad their papers.

The French "Comptes Rendus" journal works like this, and I consistently find the papers I've encountered in it to be an efficient use of my time.

The whisper network I may (or may not) be privy to, may (or may not) indicate that LA's Chem is terrible when it comes to #MeToo.

If you're not willing to give an allegation the weight of your own semi-anonymous word, and it's only an allegation, not even an anecdote...

What the hell are you even writing?