David Oks wrote a provocatively titled post a few weeks ago: “How citations ruined science”.
He begins by observing the tidal wave of AI slop in scientific publishing, musing:
But there’s something about all of this that puzzles me.
I get why students, for example, would want to avoid doing homework. But I don’t really understand why scientists would want to avoid doing science. Or, rather, why they’re so eager to use AI to produce a huge number of shoddy papers. No one forced them to become scientists. I imagine that most people who work as scientists chose to do so out of something like love for the subject. So why are scientists using AI to produce and submit so much garbage?
As an aside, this reminded me a bit of writer Freddie deBoer’s piece “If You Don’t Like Writing, Do Something Else” from a few years ago:
For as long as I can remember, these complaints - writer’s block, imposter syndrome, procrastination - have been key elements of writerly self-deprecation. They’re ubiquitous. And, in a sense, the author is correct to suggest that these are tools for identifying those humans who define themselves as writers. Get writers together in a room and soon they’ll be competing to be the one who likes writing the least. But none of it ever meant anything to me.
Oks frames this glut of low quality research not as a consequence of AI, but rather AI slop is just the latest way for people to chase the metrics academia incentivizes:
I don’t think that the answer actually has much to do with AI. It has to do, instead, with the incentives that govern scientific institutions. You could boil it down to one word: citations.
Over the last few decades, science has undergone a “citation revolution.” Scientific life used to be structured by personal reputation and mutual acquaintance; now it is defined by quantitative assessments derived from citations.
Speaking from experience, there is a widespread perception in academia that the average quality of research has been falling for a long time. There’s an old joke that publications are meant to be counted, not read.
Anyway, the piece goes into the history of the scientific citation system (and its surprising origin), the good motivation behind it, and how it’s gone off the rails.