As I pointed out in my answer to one of our readers, asking questions is difficult. You are often seen as an outsider wanting to disrupt the status quo for a political agenda.
We do not have an agenda other than sticking to evidence. However, around us, things have taken a turn for the worse for a variety of reasons, some crystal clear, some murky, and some unknown.
We have been toying with the idea of doing an occasional piece to shed light on different aspects of what we see as the decline of science and what others see as an attempt to use science to censor free thought and impose “order.”
This morning, Tom kicks off the series with a brief episode. During the night, Tom, like most other researchers, gets emails saying that XYZ had cited this or that publication of his. Reputable research platforms and databases send the emails. The message is usually something like “Tom, we found a recent citation of your research,” followed by a link and a brief explanation.
This morning’s link was to an article on peer review. The title sounded interesting, so Tom clicked the “download article” button.
For the first time, before accessing the article, Tom was asked to confirm he was human by doing the usual puzzle with a mosaic of photographs (traffic lights in this case) from which you had to identify a pre-specified object. OK, Tom did it and downloaded it.
Then Tom wondered why access had to be protected from bots and other automated systems to access papers. Well, this is a guess: the number of downloads, even on a private platform, somehow counts for career purposes, possibly like citations to one’s work and other forms of visibility. The corollary is quantity=quality. Oh dear.
If there are alternative explanations, let's hear them.
This post was written by an old geezer who is not a traffic light
The 'are you human' test may be to keep AI chatbots from scraping the site. If you want to use my work in training data, you have to pay me, and the like. I've had to go through this to read papers that weren't referred to me by anything but my desire to stick a few search terms together and see what pops out.
Academic appointments in medicine are partly determined by the applicants' citation scores. In other words, scientific excellence is equated with how many times the person's publications have been cited by others. Obviously this system is open to systematic abuse through cronyism (you scratchg my back by citing my work and I'll scratch yours) and the choice of popular topics. But the assumption that popularity = excellence is what makes citation scores truly absurd. They are undoubtedly one reason for the evident decline in the quality of scientific research and publications in medicine.