Hi!
My name is Andrey. I am a researcher with an electrical engineering background and advanced skills in power systems modelling, mathematical optimisation, electricity markets, Game Theory, and data valuation. On this channel, I upload materials related to power systems research, as well as my thoughts and advice on academia in general.
Feel free to contact me:
andreychurkin.ru/
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And this is the science we're supposed to trust? Seems like politics and bureaucracy to me
Why do we do this? If we have too much papers being published, can't scientists use their invaluable skills someplace else? Maybe I'm being dumb here, but usually, I think, an engineer finds a paper by a scientist and manages to make new technology out of it. Can't we short circuit this?
Impact of midnight car traffic to physical and mental health of prebuescent elementary school students
Classic Economics 101. Value always beats volume in the long run. Value beats small-minded ego. For me, it's the journey, the process and the solution. But I'm at the end of my career, so I can have this luxury. Don't let volume distract you from value. Do the bitch run (i.e. the volume of basic papers), but keep working on the quality. Don't get ground down by this and don't lose your obvious passion.
You are limiting yourself with this attitude. I would not say you must stay in academia or that it is worth it, there is no glamour in sacrificing. Do what is better for youself. Nevertheless, if you want to succeed in academia, you know what you get do. You know the rules of the game (you just explained them). So, instead of complaining about them, just focus on doing what you are failing to do: promote your papers and get citations. Also I think that it is pretty fair that you are evaluated on the performance of your job. For academics, performance is scientific impact, measured by number of paper and citation. Just revisit your methods, talk to more experienced people and emulate them. I am sure if you want to succed and publish 8 papers and day a get a total of 3000 citations a year you can. But for sure, it will not be doing things the way you are doing now.
My conclusion: being successful is not easy to anyone! 🤯
Why does he kinda look like Saul Goodman's cousin?
That is because they are more worried about making a name for them than actual substance and value of what is being done.
In the 1970s we would say "publish or perish". It's not new.
I totally agree with you there must be a limit of number of papers that professors can do annually. Some professors have so many postdoctoral fellows and many collaboration with other colleagues in different countries they've published many paper that they have not read them. This is a type of cheating, and it is completely unacceptable. No scientists have the capacity to publish 20 papers per year except those kinds of people.
This is not even published in a Journal!! It is just a conference paper that was not even published in a transactions conferences specialized publishing Journal. You can find its source only back in Arxiv preprint server. I suspect that it was pushed by Arxiv and Cornell University and their social media connections.
There should really apply a weight multiplier on the citation numbers of a paper for the first or else called lead author on a co-authored paper of x1 and all other subsequent authors listed in the paper should get a x0.5 multiplier.
You end up writing routine papers and recycling the same ideas instead of doing new research and then presenting it in a paper.
Brutal video. Described everything wrong with academia
Academia is like a pyramid scheme. The tenured professor sit at the top.
science is fake and gay just like everything else in the world
One thing I notice in my career is that you can make a very good paper but it will not get many citations, while a meh method gets a lot of references. The reason is because the good paper is too good no one can outperform it, but the sucky one keeps getting used as a baseline for other to show their "state of the art" performance
man science is an absolute joke... what a fucking clown world everything without exception is bullshit
Well the universities get money from their state goverment as percetage of points generated by publications. If you university focuses on quality publication for more points and prestige, while other ones keep makeing absolute tons of low impact papers, they will simply get larger percentage of the budget. That is why I did not stay after PhD. Our deparment was letting people leave and still insting on same number or more publishing points.
A valuable scholar is one whose work influences people and their work. This is easily perceived as successful experiments or proven theories yet sometimes bad or failed work can be even more useful in order to help scores of people bypass trouble, the least of which is time wasted. As is the case with search engine optimization, scholars that get cited are perceived as more important, despite most papers being plagiarized low-effort rubbish. My perception of academic papers is that most are written to put food on the table, which has many scrambling out of desperation. It's a hard trap to avoid because in terms of efficiency, you can't have people work night and day and pull off miraculous results on the daily. Things that are not efficient and don't yield results are always cast aside in competitive economies. Even hollywood has one successful movie for 50 flops and despite doing their best to cover such losses, studios can go under, budgets do shrink or inflate depending on the times and the output switches between TV and cinema and internet i.e. publishing mediums. Academia also needs to revamp its publishing mediums as well as their economic models. Why is it government money can fund so many valuable papers which are published for free - at the cost of the taxpayer - yet corporations make billions while using that information without paying anything? Fix that and you find everything. An alternative to current academia may be required, a privately funded and curated one. Naturally, such a place would need the tightest security in the world and would be under constant espionage.
Bubble of papers, that's brilliant.
It's only cited that much becausw of the AI/deep learning boom. Power systems don't have enough hype.
Academic institutions don't give a single shit about your research or achievements or how well your calculations are written. It is better to destroy all illusions about academia quickly, because it is not about "Wow, writing equations is cool, quantum field theory is cool, topology is cool." It's just "two years of a trial period, without solid chances to secure a permanent position, constant stress about that, difficulties compared to other jobs, low salaries, the idiotic system of reviews where you need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journals, having money, still send these papers back to other scientists for free reviews." And you're still not doing actually interesting stuff, because there are strict fields where some money or funds exist, and the rest are considered garbage (from the point of view of the person giving the money). You can pretend that "Okay, I will survive, I will write a lot of good papers," but it is barely possible. You will destroy your life and health and will be poor and broken in your late 30s.
nice video
Academia is a circlejerk. prove me wrong, I dare you
Very informative. Thank you
There was a Japanese cartographer in the 19th century who could not get funding because no one but him found his work valuable; his name was Ino Tadataka, and he created a map of Japan so accurate that it singlehandedly boosted the entire country’s trade and logistics. Sometimes your work is valuable, but the people who decide what’s valuable are themselves worthless.
Current academia is a hoax. It is just a way of universities getting grants , get patent and a make more money. You are just a dot in their plan. It is also a form of slavery.
Ok Sheldon Cooper
100% Facts, thanks for this magnificent, clear, and honest video! Appreciate it!
Thank you for sharing these insights. It really is great to get a real perspective before diving my career into academia
TBH, those figures are sh!!t. Not in a good quality. I think it was just hyped by some means, and it got referenced. There are millions of algorithms discovered and may be google sponsored the marketing campaign 😂 It doesn't even have that much importance though it got published.
I produced many research papers joining with Hon. Hawkings. They forgot me and the citations were not referred by the future scientists.
Similar to vasp author. Many people use it. Thus, they get many citations.
Pipeline research will certainly lower the quality of research. Research only matters when people are strongly interested.
In your opinion, why this thing still on-going? Why so many universities led by VC, Dean, heads of department who are professors, researchers did not realise on this? Why universities being led by the so-called ranking published. Besides that, why good universities forced into pressure by some countries who are journal printing such as China?
Strange. While I didn't graduate from university due to financial problems I remember my lab colleagues getting emails and calls from people around the world. And it's not like our research was super groundbreaking... We were all working with compounds that had effects on cancer cells. My research director had many projects involving material science and were always working with universities from all around the world. EDIT: Although this is from over 9 years ago so maybe things have changed in that time? EDIT 2: None of this is meant to belittle your experience, I know everyone's opportunities are different, I just feel like... It shouldn't be this way.
Keep documenting how broken the academic system is! You've got my full support!
Когда я учился в школе, я думал что каждая научная статья в наше время это настоящий прорыв в любой науке. Когда я писал свой диплом в МФТИ, я понял что 90% 'научных' статей это буллшит, который по уровню прорыва сравним с хорошим докладом отличника в 8м классе
Да, научные статьи в Московских университетах были очень посредственными. Но я не ожидал, что такая же ситуация и в науке на западе.
This video can be summed up in what the Bible says in Sirach 11, 10-11: 10 My child, don't get involved in too many things. If you try to do too much, you will suffer for it. You won't be able to finish your work, and you won't be able to get away from it either. 11 For instance, here is someone who never stops working like a slave, but gets further behind all the time.
Thanks! One of the best comments 👏👏👏
Would you recommend doing a PhD in computational fluid dynamics? Im in the UK and academia is even more toxic here
Hi! It's a complex question. PhD can be a great experience or an awful experience. There are many factors to consider. In short, I would ask you to think about these questions: 1) Are you truly interested in fluid dynamics? Do you feel any passion about modelling it, solving challenging case studies, learning new methods, etc.? 2) Are you ready to spend 3-4 years on your PhD instead of joining a company and getting more money? 3) Do you know the research group you would like to join? Find some promising professors (not necessarily senior ones) and try to have a chat/meeting with them. It is important to see if you like talking with your potential advisor, if you like their approach, energy/vibe in the group, etc. Ask as many questions as you can - then it will become clearer if you want to take this PhD. Good luck!
@@chuscience wow thank you dr churkin for the detailed answer!
PhD supervisors in Australia forcefully put their name as first author. PhD students has to do everything, labwork, writing etc etc. Or else they're threatening to kick you out in the mid of PhD. Academic misconduct happens in extreme amounts. I'm planning to take legal actions.
Sorry to hear that. We had such practice (professor's name always goes first) in Russia and back in the Soviet Union. I think this is changing now. In most Western universities, students/researchers are the first authors.
Why are those universities so driven by papers? How much do they make for each publication?
Funding sources demand return on their money so university management uses things like paper citations to show value to the funders.
@@TheDanEdwards but how does the funding source make money with those papers?
@@Jieyang-gp2mq Funders want to measure how well their efforts are paying off. If a funding source is not happy they'll turn off the money. A way funders measure if they are getting value for their money is to count the product, which in academia is often the published papers.
In my opinion, even with a broken system of publishing and giving value to papers in academia, science, in total, will not lose much. Yes, we have a lot of "noise" generated from bad-quality papers, but prestige journals can be considered a "filter" from it. To become a successful researcher (or become successful somebady), you need to push yourself to the limits, and in this video, you gave a good "receipt" for what you should do. Thinking about what is to be a researcher in academia I always remember my first years of my PhD. I just didn't know what to do, but now the answer is clear... All "the answers" you can see in this particular video. I really agree with every bullet point in this video. But, again, in general, the value of papers declining, but if you are good enough, you can distinguish bad research from good ones. This decline is not the end. The importance of discovery does not always give you respect or increase your salary.If you really love to be a scientist or researcher, you will do it anyway. Work in academia is only for very special people with unusual outlooks of life.
Because only the best 1% matters
There is no reason why we should have to filter in the first place. Only good papers should be published. And isn't it bad that so many of our top minds are pipelined into careers of bad/mediocre research? We need to put talent to better use.
@@Dg0yd I think that only in an ideal world the rule "only good papers should be published" will apply. I agree that only good papers, which at least have true, real data, should be published. But we can struggle with the assessment of the value of the papers. For example, in material science, many journals require novelty in research. But a lot of researchers in developing countries (or even in developed countries) publish papers just repeating experiments or resynthesizing materials from the past. This papers can appear even in high quality journals (Q1, Q2). How it is possible? Is it all becase of incompetence of editorial board or just coincedence? I think, all this tells us that in the real world, it is very hard to follow the rule that "only good papers should be published"... We can only "filter" all noise by ourselves... Recently, we discussed this problem of academia with colleagues, and I suggested that the scientific society create a new type of document. Report. At least it should help with the problem of the endless repetition of similar experiments in material science. This document should be based on real, true data and doesn't require novelty. If researchers want to publish a scientific article, another requerements should be made for submission.
buy "academic likes"?
The word "research" is becoming ironic. researchers are trying to look for something that can easily lead to publications.
Why write papers if nobody is reading them anyway? Better to keep all to yourself and use it to work on things that actually matter.
You are a real scientist. You're amazed to find out that inflation exists... But you found it by yourself! You're brave showing your face with these considerations and topic, congratulations. 1 observation: any other form of dedicating yourself to a career will be equally degradating and disappointing. Work and slavery are synonyms.
BUT SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT ...
More papers, more government grant for the faculty, government too judges an academic body by the number of published papers
The algorithm can help produce papers…