Comments on: PDFs that nobody reads

By: Grasspunk

Grasspunk — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 14:47:34 +0000

Sometimes the opposite happens. There's a paper where I am second author that I never wrote a word of and it has been cited a lot (263 times according to this). And then it was used as an example in "how to cite" documents in the social sciences, e.g. here. So the reference appears all over the place. Too bad I wasn't a psychologist looking for tenure.

By: Kudzu Bob

Kudzu Bob — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 12:44:26 +0000

Catchier titles might help.

“One Weird Trick to End African Poverty.”

By: Bob Sykes

Bob Sykes — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 11:11:43 +0000

The same thing happens in the sciences. The vast majority of papers are never cited or even read, but the authors get tenure.

By: Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 07:10:26 +0000

Alrenous:

I was thinking more that since zero good ideas have been spotted in the few PDFs that people have read, and if you assume there’s a normal distribution of good ideas, and you take the mean to be 0 and the stdv to be 0, then you come up with…

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 04:25:36 +0000

Steve Johnson:

Oh sure. But you would have to read through so much crap to find them it’s significantly faster to think up your own good ideas.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 04:13:30 +0000

The imperative is to publish. No one said anything about readership.

By: Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 23:37:40 +0000

But the sheer numbers dictate that there are probably a lot of really, really good ideas out there that never see the light of day.

Do they?

By: James James

James James — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 20:29:49 +0000

Who was it that said if you really want to get your ideas out there, write books, not articles.