Category: 1.1 Research (General)

  • Some associated editors should grow a spine

    Some associated editors should grow a spine

    There, it happened again. An associate editor of a prestigious software engineering journal rejected our paper, because they wouldn’t overrule a single bogus review. In the current case, all reviewers were on plain accept, with one holdout, reviewer 2, who recommended a plain reject. (The paper was the first revised version of the original submission.)…

  • Editorial quality at Elsevier

    Editorial quality at Elsevier

    If you ever wondered about editorial quality at Elsevier, look no further. Original here and in case it gets fixed, on the Web Archive here, and finally the PDF.

  • How to extend the authorship list of a research article

    How to extend the authorship list of a research article

    Let’s assume you are a scientist, collaborating with another scientist on some research project that will lead to exactly one article (to keep things simple). How should you go about involving further scientists, perhaps to perform even stronger research? The answer is simple, if you work from first principles. Here there are the two key…

  • Is science biased?

    Is science biased?

    tl;dr The individual researcher typically is, but science as a community of peers isn’t. (For caveats see bottom of post.) This post was inspired by a social media post by Prem Devanbu. Individual scientists naturally have opinions, ambitions, and hopes, and this influences the research questions they chase and the hypotheses they frame. Despite many…

  • Industry is where the research data is

    Industry is where the research data is

    Over on Facebook, Lionel Briand commented on how hard it is for an academic research group to compete with industrial organizations on research. This is certainly true for hot topics. Right now, with a burning hot AI summer, the research world is split into the have and have-nots (in terms of GPU resources), and this…

  • Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    The most basic academic currency are your publications. While you can’t (or shouldn’t) trade them, they are the way of how other researchers keep track of you and keep score. The higher your score, the higher you are in the pecking order, of course. A publication has two aspects to it that determine its value:…