Unsupervised Thinking

Sometimes scientists decide to turn their tools of inquiry inward to understand their own fields and behaviors. For our 20th episode, we're diving into this meta-science by reading some papers about by papers written by scientists studying scientists. In particular, we start with a commentary discussing the increasing size of scientific teams, and what that means for credit assignment. Do we need to move to a more Hollywood approach by highlighting specific achievements in different roles? Also, when will we address the fact that most young researchers on these teams will not have a career in academic science? We then get into a modeling study that aims to show how incentivizing the publication of novel results can ultimate lead to a widespread decrease in scientific quality. This raises questions of whether individuals or the system is to blame for high rates of shoddy publications. We then touch on a small experiment that the conference NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) performed on their peer re