This all sounds rather grim, an extreme case of the hype and uneven quality that probably afflicts all research areas now… Number 8 seems especially grim, even though it doesn’t involve outright corruption, since it means that any counter-institution trying to do quality control will be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of papers… Nonetheless: What you describe is a way to check the quality of an individual paper. Is there any kind of resource that reliably turns up high-quality papers? Perhaps literature reviews or citation counts?
Is there any kind of resource that reliably turns up high-quality papers?
No you just have to filter. In any particular field you get to know the agendas and limitations of many of the researchers. X is a shill for company Y, A pushes the limits for p hacking, B has a fixed mindset about low fat diets. etc. Some researchers also tend to produce me-too and derivative papers, others are more innovative.
Also you do get quicker at spotting the fatal flaw.
In finance there are blogs that pick out recent good papers; these are a huge time saver (e.g. Alpha Architect which I have mentioned before).
This all sounds rather grim, an extreme case of the hype and uneven quality that probably afflicts all research areas now… Number 8 seems especially grim, even though it doesn’t involve outright corruption, since it means that any counter-institution trying to do quality control will be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of papers… Nonetheless: What you describe is a way to check the quality of an individual paper. Is there any kind of resource that reliably turns up high-quality papers? Perhaps literature reviews or citation counts?
No you just have to filter. In any particular field you get to know the agendas and limitations of many of the researchers. X is a shill for company Y, A pushes the limits for p hacking, B has a fixed mindset about low fat diets. etc. Some researchers also tend to produce me-too and derivative papers, others are more innovative.
Also you do get quicker at spotting the fatal flaw.
In finance there are blogs that pick out recent good papers; these are a huge time saver (e.g. Alpha Architect which I have mentioned before).