• mecfs@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    6 months ago

    This is why I hate it so much when authors overstate their findings in abstract, which unfortunately is extremely common in medicine.

  • Liz@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    5 months ago

    As a scientific researcher I am amazed at everyone being all like “yeah me too.”

    #WHAT

    How you about to be citing something without being 100% sure it actually supports your claim? That shit could easily have a bunch of qualifications you don’t know about!

    #ALSO

    Bruh. If it’s worth citing, it’s worth reading the whole paper. You might learn something or gain inspiration for future work. Plus, you know, always be learnin, yo.

    You guys are gonna hate me.

    • Tehzbeef@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      5 months ago

      I was aiding in a peer review and was diligently checking citations and sources to find that the majority of sources used had relevant titles but did not support the claims the author was making… I pointed these out and was removed from reviewing with the professor saying I needed to offer positive comments only ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • Shelena@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        5 months ago

        I am sorry, but what is wrong with your professor? You were doing exactly what you are supposed to do in a peer review. You should go look for things that are wrong or should be improved and only if the paper can withstand that process, it should be published. Only providing positive comments is really harmful to the scientific process and, in the end, to society.

        To be honest, I think I reject more than half of the papers that I review. The rest require major or minor revision. It is not that I have a target or anything for how many I need to reject, it is just that most papers are of such low quality that I cannot do anything else. I think the number of papers I reject is quite normal in my field.

        So, not all your comments need to be positive. If there is reason to be positive, you should mention it. And your comments should be constructive and respectful, but definitely not always positive.

        In the case you are describing where the authors seem to only have read the titles of the papers, I would definitely reject. This is fraud. You are saying you did a literature study and you did not. So, I would be quite clear about that. I would also be a bit angry that they wasted my time. So, in my opinion, that is how a reviewer should respond in this situation, not with only positive comments.

    • ZMoney@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 months ago

      Sometimes. Sometimes it’s an intro sentence that already has 2 citations and just needs a 3rd, and you just find a paper with more measurements and the same conclusions.

      • Shelena@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        5 months ago

        Oh, I did not know that. I have been doing it wrong all these years then. Could have been drinking cocktails on the beach instead of reading all these papers.

    • shneancy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      don’t forget skimming the paper for quotes and or handy graphs if you’re feeling ambitious

      • frickineh@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        5 months ago

        TIL I was ambitious. And here I thought my attitude of, “I can skip these 2 papers and still have a solid C,” made me kind of a bum. NOPE! I skimmed so many papers.

    • Liz@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 months ago

      Lol at that paper.

      My favorite part about Dunning-Kruger is that I see extremely wrong explanations of it all the time. While being wrong isn’t exactly what Dunning-Kruger is about, it’s usually what those wrong explanations think it’s about.

  • Ibaudia@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    6 months ago

    Honestly if the abstract can’t deliver a succinct and accurate summary of the findings and their limitations, then it’s probably a bad paper that you wouldn’t want to cite.

    • lad@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      I think, the bigger problem is when the abstract tells that everything is all nice and simple, but in reality it’s not

      • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        5 months ago

        … Is it ever?

        If you have to end every sentence with outliers aside… Then maybe people should understand that they are talking about the norm. Not your fringe anecdotal cases lol.

        • lad@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          5 months ago

          I’ve been far away from academia for a long time, but last time I read papers on voice processing it went something like this:

          Abstract: we’ve achieved [very good results] using this one simple trick…

          Body: actually, we will maybe not tell what was the corpus we used to measure how good we are. We’re also going to omit several important steps where they can be omitted nonchalantly, so that reproducing what seems to be a thorough description will be a pain

          So, I don’t know if it ever is all nice and simple, but man could it be better if things were always done in good faith and professionally