Comments on: Rewriting the History of the Open Access Debate

By: Gaming the System: Do Promises of Citation Advantage Go Too Far? « The Scholarly Kitchen

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:31:42 +0000

[...] of a paper results in a higher number of citations. Results of these studies vary wildly, and the methodologies used are often disputed. Last month saw the release of a new study of legal scholarship, which was touted in a widely read [...]

By: Online Access and Citations — A Spurious Relationship, Economists Say « The Scholarly Kitchen

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:32:11 +0000

[...] huge access-citation effects — i.e., they are artifacts of improper statistical analysis. The fact that there are many of these poor studies in the literature, or that their claims have achieved consensus among certain like-minded individuals, does not make [...]

By: Weekoogst #4 « Een beetje adjunct

Weekoogst #4 « Een beetje adjunct — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 20:06:11 +0000

[...] gepubliceerde artikelen opnieuw werd aangetoond. Phil Davis zette daar op de Scholarly Kitchen-blog methodologische vraagtekens bij, die vervolgens leidden tot pogingen Davis de mond te snoeren, felle kritiek van Davis’ [...]

By: Philip Davis

Philip Davis — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:26:07 +0000

AJ, I'm not sure I understand the source of your ire. In the March 1st issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand discusses the development and use of Thalidomide as an anxiolytic in his review of the history of psychiatry. More recently in the New York Times, Carl Zimmer investigates how Thalidomide causes developmental limb defects. Please read these and then come back and let us know if we are still a sewer.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:51:58 +0000

Oh great. Now the New York Times has fallen into the sewer.

By: Richard Wynne

Richard Wynne — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:52:19 +0000

Yes, in a very literal sense a document with valuable information that is read by more people provides greater benefit to society. But equally (more?) important is the “feedback signal” from the scholarly publishing process that informs future research investment decisions. This can’t just be a readership popularity contest. Hundreds of billions are spent each year on research, so it’s critical for the citation “signal” to be clear and unbiased by that author’s choice of publication format. I agree the problem of measuring relative impact in different publication models goes away if all publication is in the OA model.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:32:39 +0000

Question: this Wired article makes mention of thalidomide in a similar context, as an exemplar of the dangerous things that can happen when one relies on a quantity of scientific studies that are incorrectly performed. Does that make Wired a "sewer" as well?

By: Sarah

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:49:28 +0000

How do we know what “early expectations” of open access were, before people started looking at the effects it had in practice on citation counts? Were there studies published? If so, reference to those would be very helpful.

By: Bora Zivkovic

Bora Zivkovic — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:20:17 +0000

Isn’t this backwards? Isn’t the ‘social function’ of citation skewed by differential visibility of papers? Imagine a world in which all papers are OA, equally visible to search engines? In such a world, it does not matter if a paper was published in a GlamourMag or a tiny society journal, or arXiv – the good papers would be noticed, downloaded and yes, cited more. Thus the ‘social function’ of citation counting would finally approach something like real reflection of the quality of the work (let’s now put aside all the problems with citations in general: citing bad work to criticize it, copy+pasting classics in the field without reading, mis-citation of papers for saying something they don’t say, self-citation, preferentially citing friends, etc.)

By: If You Can’t Stand the Heat: Open Dialog and Open Access « The Scholarly Kitchen

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:40:47 +0000

[...] week, Phil Davis published a post criticizing a paper reviewing the evidence around the purported “c…. Two OA proponents contacted SSP leadership to complain about the Scholarly Kitchen, urging the SSP [...]