Elsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed. This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in them losing their jobs.

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grumbelbart2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This goes deeper than the institutions, actually. The KPI for many (non-industrial) researchers is the number of publications and citations. That's what careers and funding depends on.

Goodhart's law states "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", and that's what we see here. There is a strong incentive to publish more instead of better. Ideas are spread into multiple papers, people push to be listed as authors, citations are fought for, and some become dishonest and start with citation cartels, "hidden" citations in papers (printed small in white-on-white, meaning it's indexed by citation crawlers but not visible to reviewers) and so forth.

This also destroys the peer review system upon which many venues depend. Peer reviews were never meant to catch cheaters. The huge number of low-to-medium quality papers in some fields (ML, CV) overworks reviewers, leading to things like CVPR forcing authors to be reviewers or face desk rejection. AI papers, AI reviews of dubious quality slice in even more.

Ultimately the only true fix for this is to remove the incentives. Funding and careers should no longer depend on the sheer number of papers and citations. The issue is that we have not really found anything better yet.

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BrenBarn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What you describe is still a problem with the institutions, because it is ultimately the institutions that provide the incentives (in the form of jobs). You're right that they're using bad metrics, but it is the institutions who are making those bad decisions based on the bad metrics.

There are lots of better things, like people making hiring and firing decisions based on their evaluation of the content of papers they have actually read, instead of just a number. If someone is publishing so many papers that a hiring committee can't even read a meaningful fraction of them, that should be a red flag in itself, rather than a green one.

	▲	grumbelbart2 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's true that hire and tenure decisions are under the institution's control. But a lot of funding comes from external sources, and most public funding uses some sort of publication-based metric. There are exceptions, but that's the game. The CV of your PhD's is often judged by the publication list and the corresponding citations. That's research institutes where they might go, other universities, large companies etc. will look at this. It's difficult to change this system as isolated player, and coordinates efforts so far failed on the "what else" question.

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khafra 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's imperfect ways to work with goodhartable metrics. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fuSaKr6t6Zuh6GKaQ/when-is-go... talks about some of them (in the context of when they go bad).

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newsclues an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The incentive to disprove bad science ought to be greater.

	▲	matwood 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. There should be much greater incentives to (in)validate prior publications. That is what science is about.

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anewhnaccount2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The needle is beginning to move on this I believe: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00321-5

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permo-w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Evil Seer would be a good anagram if only Elsevier did any of the actual [re]viewing themselves