The Gaming of Citation and Authorship

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on February 22, 2023 by telescoper

About ten days ago I wrote a piece about authorship of scientific papers in which I pointed out that in astrophysics in cosmology it is often the case that many “authors” (i.e. people listed in the author list) of papers (largely those emanating from large consortia) often haven’t even read the paper they are claiming to have written.

I now draw your attention to a paper by Stuart Macdonald, with the abstract:

You can find the full paper here, but unfortunately it requires a subscription. Open Access hasn’t reached sociology yet.

The paper focuses on practices in medicine, but it would be very wrong to assume that the issues are confined to that discipline; others have already fallen into the mire. I draw your attention in particular to the sentence:

Many authors in medicine have made no meaningful contribution to the article that bears their names, and those who have contributed most are often not named as authors. 

The first bit certainly also applies to astronomy, for example.

The paper does not just discuss authorship, but also citations. I won’t discuss the Journal Impact Factor further, as any sane person knows that it is daft. Citations are not just used to determine the JIF, however – citations at article level make more sense, but are also not immune from gaming, and although they undoubtedly contain some information, they do not tell the whole story. Nor will I discuss the alleged ineffectiveness of peer review in medicine (about which I know nothing). I will however end with one further quote from the abstract:

The problem is magnified by the academic publishing industry and by academic institutions….

So many problems are…

The underlying cause of all this is that the people in charge of academic institutions nowadays have no concept of the intrinsic value of research and scholarship. The only things that are meaningful in their world are metrics. Everything we do now is reduced to key performance indicators, such as publication and citation counts. This mindset is a corrupting influence encourages perverse behaviour among researchers as well as managers.

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Euclid in a Nutshell

Posted in Euclid, Literature, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on February 21, 2023 by telescoper

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space…

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene II.

It Hamlet rather than Euclid who said those words, but they came into my mind when I saw the latest nice video about the Euclid Mission from the European Space Agency, entitled Euclid in a Nutshell. It’s a quick one-minute summary of of what the mission is for and what it will do:

The text with the video reads:

ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

Euclid is a fully European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium – consisting of more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the US, Canada and Japan – provided the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its Service Module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the Payload Module, including the telescope. NASA provided the near-infrared detectors of the NISP instrument.

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To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa

Posted in History, Jazz with tags , , , , , on February 21, 2023 by telescoper

Today is Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, and Mardi Gras, which gives me three excuses to post an authentic New Orleans parade tune from way back in 1927.

Jazz began with the marching bands that performed in New Orleans but then largely moved into the bordellos of Storyville, the biggest (legal) red light district in the history of the United States. When Storyville was closed down in 1917 as a threat to the health of the US Navy most professional jazz musicians lost their only source of regular income. Fortunately the very lawmakers who condemned jazz for its association with vice and crime soon passed a law that unwittingly ensured the music’s survival, proposing the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, passed in 1919, which prohibited the manufacture, distribution and sale of alcohol for human consumption. This was soon followed by the Volstead Act, which gave federal government the powers to enforce the 18th amendment. This ushered in the era of Prohibition, which turned Chicago into a bootlegger’s paradise almost overnight and jazz musicians flocked there to perform in the numerous speakeasies. That’s why so many of the great New Orleans Jazz records of the 1920s were actually made in Chicago.

Although the exodus was substantial, not all Jazz musicians left New Orleans. Many stayed there and kept the roots of the music going while it branched out in Chicago and, later, New York. Most of the bands that stayed kept going through the depression but never really achieved great commercial success until the traditional Jazz revival of the 1940s and 1950s. This example is a record produced by the Victor Record Company who sent a recording unit to New Orleans in 1927 to record some of the musicians who had stayed behind, many of them still playing in the marching band tradition of Buddy Bolden.

The title is To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa. I don’t know what it means but it’s an old French creole version of a tune that has subsequently reappeared many times in different forms with different names, most notably Bucket’s Got A Hole In it. The band is Louis Dumaine’s Jazzola Eight. Besides the lead cornet of Louis Dumaine, who lived from 1889 to 1949, it’s worth mentioning the clarinet style of Willie Joseph, which is heavily influenced by that of the great Johnny Dodds.

Anyway, it’s the kind of jaunty march-like number that’s perfect as a Mardi Gras parade tune and it always puts a spring in my step every time I hear it! There are also some old photographs of Mardi Gras parades to get you in the mood.

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Cosmic Composition – Paul Klee

Posted in Art with tags , , on February 20, 2023 by telescoper

by Paul Klee (1919, 48 x 41 cm, oil on board, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany).

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on February 20, 2023 by telescoper

It’s time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics Open Journal of Astrophysics. This was published last week (on 15th February 2023) but there was a slight delay in getting the DOI activated and all the metadata registered so I waited until that was done before announcing the paper here.

The latest paper is the 8th paper in Volume 6 (2023) as well as the 73rd in all. This one is another one for the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The title is “The N5K Challenge: Non-Limber Integration for LSST Cosmology”. The paper is about ways of avoiding using the ubiquitous Limber Approximation which, I discovered this morning, is now 70 years old, Nelson Limber’s original paper on the subject having been published in January 1953.

The lead author of the paper is Danielle Leonard of Newcastle University and there are ten co-authors from around the world in countries including UK, USA, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and France on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

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Parnell Memorial

Posted in Biographical, History with tags , , , on February 19, 2023 by telescoper

Yesterday’s march, which started near Parnell Square, passed by the Monument to 19th century Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell on O’Connell Street in Dublin. I took the above picture on the way there, before the march.

I was an undergraduate student at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which just happens to be where  Charles Stewart Parnell studied, although I hasten to add that we weren’t contemporaries. There is an annual Parnell Lecture at Magdalene in his honour; an annual Coles lecture is yet to be established.

Parnell was reportedly one of the most charismatic, capable and influential Parliamentarians of his era. He led the Irish Parliamentary Party at the forefront of moves for Home Rule for Ireland. He also had a splendid beard:

His career was cut short by scandal in the form of an adulterous relationship with Kitty (Katherine) O’Shea, whom her husband divorced in 1889 naming Parnell in the case, and whom he married after the divorce. (Kitty, that is, not her husband.) They were not to enjoy life together for long, however, as Parnell died in 1891 of pneumonia in the arms of his wife at their home in Brighton (Hove, actually).

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#IrelandForAll

Posted in Biographical, Politics on February 18, 2023 by telescoper

The day has come and I’ll shortly be getting on a train into Dublin to attend the above event in Parnell Square this afternoon. Somewhat annoyingly I’ve had a flare-up of my arthritis recently, but I think it’s important to stand up and be counted. There are rumours that “far-right agitators” (i.e. fascist thugs) are planning to disrupt the event, but if any of them have a go at me I’ll fend them off with my walking-stick!

Update: the journey to Dublin by train was uneventful except that a little boy sitting in the same carriage as me was very upset that it didn’t actually go “choo choo” like his Mam had told him it would.

Update: I’m back in Maynooth enjoying a nice cup of tea, after a very enjoyable day in Dublin. There were many more people on the march than I expected – upwards of 30,000 – which was great, but meant it was very crowded and difficult to take pictures of anything but backs of people.

We took a long while to get going because of the numbers, so I reached the end too late to hear some of the speakers and musicians at the rally. Some of us were still in O’Connell Street when the front of the march arrived at the Customs House. I’m very sorry I missed Christy Moore and Bernadette McAliskey, but the huge turnout was in itself more than adequate compensation.

I am also happy to report that the rumored far-right counter-protest failed to materialize so the whole event went off peacefully. The important thing now, as many of the speakers at the rally stressed, is to ensure that this is just the start.

You can find a report on the march here.

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Three weeks in…

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on February 17, 2023 by telescoper

The first quarter of the second Semester at Maynooth University has flown by. I’ve now done three weeks of lectures and even conducted the first class test in the computer lab. It is from the correcting of these submissions that I am now taking a short break to compose this blog.

Amazingly, for the first time ever, there have been no major problems in the Computational Physics lab at all. In previous years, something has always gone wrong but not (so far) this time round. I’m sure our nice new digital display screen has also improved the experience for the students in that they can now actually see the instructions I give them!

I’m actually ahead of the game in my Advanced Electromagnetism module, having done 7 lectures in 3 weeks instead of the usual 6, because I used one of my tutorial slots to give an extra lecture, anticipating that I’d lose a lecture on Good Friday (7th April) as this is a national holiday in Ireland. The following week is a holiday here too. Three weeks from now we have the mid-term Study Break (13th-17th March, ending on St Patrick’s Day), so after the first six weeks of this Semester we get a little more time to relax.

Soon it will be time to write the examinations for Semester 2. I need to think up some questions for Advanced Electromagnetism and Computational Physics. Writing an examination takes the same time regardless of how many students are taking it, but when the class sizes are small it takes much less time to do the marking. There is a large component of continuous assessment in Computational Physics, which means more work for me through the term, but there are only 25 in the class so it’s not too bad. The class for Advanced Electromagnetism is even smaller, which should make my marking workload in June a bit less heavy than it was in January.

Today students were notified of their provisional Semester 1 examination results. I expect I’ll be talking to some of them next week to discuss their options in the light of the outcome. Final marks don’t get confirmed until the Summer, when we have a full meeting of the Examination Board together with the External Examiner. Marks don’t usually change but they can if the Board decides they should.

We often have a seminar on Friday afternoons but we don’t have one today which is why I’ve got time to write this post. Often I go to the National Concert Hall on Friday evenings but I’m not going this evening. I decided to have a quiet night in tonight, as I’ve got something important to do tomorrow. After I finish marking this first class test I think I’ll toddle off home.

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A 13-billion-year-old Galaxy Spectrum

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on February 16, 2023 by telescoper

The Galaxy GN-z11 has been known for some time to have a very high redshift z~11 (hence the name) but you can now feast your eyes on the exquisite infrared spectrum of this object recently obtained using JWST:

It’s incredible to see so many clear emission lines for an object at such an enormous distance. The light from this galaxy set out towards us over 13 billion years in the past, when the Universe was less than 400 million years old, so it provides clues about the very early stages of cosmic structure formation. The spectral lines can not only be used to establish the redshift with great precision – it is z = 10.603 – but also to probe the physical properties of this source and its environment. The progress in this field is truly remarkable thanks to superb advances in observational technology.

For more details of this amazing result see the paper by Bunker et al now on the arXiv.

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50 Years of Hawking & Ellis

Posted in mathematics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 15, 2023 by telescoper

Today, 16th February 2023, sees the official publication of a special 50th anniversary edition classic monograph on the large scale structure of space-time by Stephen Hawking and George Ellis. My copy of a standard issue of the book is on the left; the special new edition is on the right. The book has been reprinted many times, which testifies to its status as an authoritative treatise. I don’t have the new edition, actually. I just stole the picture from the Facebook page of George Ellis, with whom I have collaborated on a book (though not one as significant as the one shown above).

This book is by no means an introductory text but is full of interesting insights for people who have studied general relativity before. Stephen Hawking left us some years ago, of course, but George is still going strong so let me take this opportunity to congratulate him on the publication of this special anniversary edition!

P.S It struck me while writing this post that I’ve been working as a cosmologist in various universities for getting on for about 35 years and I’ve never taught a course on general relativity. As I’ll be retiring pretty soon it’s looking very likely that I never will…

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