Years ago I did a lot of original research in a field that wasn't very well developed at the time. However, that research took place in the context of a startup, not academia. I was rewarded for producing solutions that worked - not for publishing papers.
I was approached by a few academics about publishing what I'd worked on, but I never did. I never did because I did consume large stacks of papers every month, and I absolutely hated the pompous, obfuscated portioning out of ideas fragment by fragment. It was an unnecessarily time consuming, and often quite useless way of sharing information. Especially since source code often wasn't part of what was published so a lot of important information got lost (which I guess was the entire point of not publishing code).
I particularly remember a 4-5 page paper that was so poorly written it took me a couple of readings (weeks apart) to realize that it described something I too had worked on. How bad is a paper when it is so obfuscated that it takes effort to recognize something you have worked on too?
I wasn't interested in wasting time dressing up my notes in drag. And if my notes as they were were not good enough, well, then someone else would surely do the same work independently and publish something at some point. Lots of the things I worked on inevitably were described by other people.
I have a love-hate relationship to scientific papers for the simple reason that they sometimes aren't really about science, but about scoring points in academia and certain types of research organizations. Yes, a lot of interesting goodies are published, but my god there is a lot of garbage that gets published. Not least because people in academia are incentivized to get as many papers as possible out of what ought to be a single publishable unit.
If we incentivize authors to spam us, they will spam us.
If it's any consolation, even if the source code was provided, it is highly unlikely that it would have been of much better organisation or quality than the paper itself.
I'm afraid you are right, but it should be a priority that people with PhDs know how to write decent code. In several workplaces I've worked before the term "PhD-code" was an euphemism for "disorganized, buggy mess".
I was approached by a few academics about publishing what I'd worked on, but I never did. I never did because I did consume large stacks of papers every month, and I absolutely hated the pompous, obfuscated portioning out of ideas fragment by fragment. It was an unnecessarily time consuming, and often quite useless way of sharing information. Especially since source code often wasn't part of what was published so a lot of important information got lost (which I guess was the entire point of not publishing code).
I particularly remember a 4-5 page paper that was so poorly written it took me a couple of readings (weeks apart) to realize that it described something I too had worked on. How bad is a paper when it is so obfuscated that it takes effort to recognize something you have worked on too?
I wasn't interested in wasting time dressing up my notes in drag. And if my notes as they were were not good enough, well, then someone else would surely do the same work independently and publish something at some point. Lots of the things I worked on inevitably were described by other people.
I have a love-hate relationship to scientific papers for the simple reason that they sometimes aren't really about science, but about scoring points in academia and certain types of research organizations. Yes, a lot of interesting goodies are published, but my god there is a lot of garbage that gets published. Not least because people in academia are incentivized to get as many papers as possible out of what ought to be a single publishable unit.
If we incentivize authors to spam us, they will spam us.