文件名称：Warning Signs of Bogus Progress in Research in an Age of Rich Computation and Information
文件大小：65KB
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更新时间：2012-11-30 15:45:10
Warning Signs of Bogus Progress
More and more frequently, some of my students get very confused about papers published in the literature and ask if they should follow the same style in order to get their work published more quickly. My answer to such questions is always: The only thing that is worse than not publishing is to publish wrong or bogus results. As wrong results are easy to tell and correct, the question boils down to what constitutes “bogus results.” Very surprisingly, I could not find any precise, satisfactory description for them in the literature.1 The reason may be that there has never been a period in the history of science when bogus results could be produced and reproduced with such efficiency and at such volume, due to the rich computational and information resource now available. So I have decided to give it a try myself. Realizing that subtleties of the definition could differ a lot for different people or for different fields, I hereby try to only identify some of the most common troubling signs of bogus results, tailored to the resource-rich scenario, and hope to provide some guidelines for my students.