Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Useful science, useless science

I have commented before on the analysis that suggests that the majority of scientific publications are, in fact, wrong. (see New Scientist, 30 Aug. 2005)  (I'm sure that the exact proportion varies some from one scientific field to another.)

I have observed that there are also a lot of papers that may not be wrong as such but which are just not very useful.  I won't name names but there is, for instance, a lot of work in computer science that involves the same old methods and algorithms but rewritten in whatever programming language happens to be popular at that time.

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