online study
not peer reviewed
“published” on arxiv (which is a public document server, not a journal)
study and authors not named or linked in the article
tl/dr: “Someone uploaded a pdf and we’re writing about it.”
Also CS doesn’t really do academia like other sciences, being somewhere on the intersection of maths, engineering, and tinkering. Shit’s definitely not invalid just because it hasn’t been submitted to a journal this could’ve been a blog post but there’s academics involved so publish or perish applies.
Or, differently put: If you want to review it, bloody hell do it it’s open access. A quick skim tells me “way more thorough than I care to read for the quite less than extraordinary claim”.
You are overrating peer reviewing. It’s basically a tool to help editors to understand if a paper “sells”, to improve readability and to discard clear garbage.
If methodologies are not extremely flawed, peer reviewing almost never impact quality of the results, as reviewers do not redo the work. From the “trustworthy” point of view, peer reviewing is comparable to a biased rng. Google for actual reproducibility of published experiments and peer-reviewing biases for more details
Most peer reviewed papers are non reproducible. Peer review has the primary purpose of telling the editor how sellable is a paper in a small community he only superficially knows, and to make it more attractive to that community by suggesting rephrasing of paragraphs, additional references, additional supporting experiment to clarify unclear points.
But it doesn’t guarantees methodology is not flawed. Editor chooses reviewer very superficially, and reviews are mainly driven by biases, and reviewers cannot judge the quality of a research because they do not reproduce it.
Honesty of researchers is what guarantees quality of a paper
There is some variation across disciplines; I do think that in general the process does catch a lot of frank rubbish (and discourages submission of obvious rubbish), but from time to time I do come across inherently flawed work in so-called “high impact factor” and allegedly “prestigious” journals.
In the end, even after peer review, you need to have a good understanding of the field and to have developed and applied your critical appraisal skills.
And TBF just getting on arxiv also means you jumped a bullshit hurdle: Roughly speaking you need to be in a position in academia, or someone there needs to vouch for the publication. At the same time getting something published there isn’t exactly prestigious so there’s no real incentive to game the system, as such the bar is quite low but consistent.
Arxiv is a pre print archive. Many very prestigious researchers put their pre prints there. It is as credible as any journal (more than many out there nowadays). Its presentation is just less curated and a selection is missing, because there is no editor. Readers of a paper must know what they are reading, and must critically assess it.
Absolutely. One needs to know what is reading. That’s why pre prints are fine.
High impact factor journals are full of works purposely wrong, made because author wants the results that readers are looking for (that is the easiest way to be published in high impact factor journal).
tl/dr: “Someone uploaded a pdf and we’re writing about it.”
I suppose it’s this paper. Most prolific author seems to be Gene Tsudik, h-index of 103. Yeah that’s not “someone”. Also the paper is accepted for USENIX Security 2023, which is actually ongoing right now.
Also CS doesn’t really do academia like other sciences, being somewhere on the intersection of maths, engineering, and tinkering. Shit’s definitely not invalid just because it hasn’t been submitted to a journal this could’ve been a blog post but there’s academics involved so publish or perish applies.
Or, differently put: If you want to review it, bloody hell do it it’s open access. A quick skim tells me “way more thorough than I care to read for the quite less than extraordinary claim”.
I mean its pretty obvious that nowadays AI is absolutely capable of doing that and some people are just blind or fat finger the keyboard.
I mean, it is The World’s Hardest Game
You are overrating peer reviewing. It’s basically a tool to help editors to understand if a paper “sells”, to improve readability and to discard clear garbage.
If methodologies are not extremely flawed, peer reviewing almost never impact quality of the results, as reviewers do not redo the work. From the “trustworthy” point of view, peer reviewing is comparable to a biased rng. Google for actual reproducibility of published experiments and peer-reviewing biases for more details
Preprints are fine, just less polished
Peer reviewing is how you know the methodology is not flawed…
Unfortunately not. https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
Most peer reviewed papers are non reproducible. Peer review has the primary purpose of telling the editor how sellable is a paper in a small community he only superficially knows, and to make it more attractive to that community by suggesting rephrasing of paragraphs, additional references, additional supporting experiment to clarify unclear points.
But it doesn’t guarantees methodology is not flawed. Editor chooses reviewer very superficially, and reviews are mainly driven by biases, and reviewers cannot judge the quality of a research because they do not reproduce it.
Honesty of researchers is what guarantees quality of a paper
Yes. A senior colleague sometimes tongue-in-cheek referred to it as Pee Review.
The downvotes to my comments shows that no many people here has ever done research or knows the editorial system of scientific journals :D
There is some variation across disciplines; I do think that in general the process does catch a lot of frank rubbish (and discourages submission of obvious rubbish), but from time to time I do come across inherently flawed work in so-called “high impact factor” and allegedly “prestigious” journals.
In the end, even after peer review, you need to have a good understanding of the field and to have developed and applied your critical appraisal skills.
And TBF just getting on arxiv also means you jumped a bullshit hurdle: Roughly speaking you need to be in a position in academia, or someone there needs to vouch for the publication. At the same time getting something published there isn’t exactly prestigious so there’s no real incentive to game the system, as such the bar is quite low but consistent.
Arxiv is a pre print archive. Many very prestigious researchers put their pre prints there. It is as credible as any journal (more than many out there nowadays). Its presentation is just less curated and a selection is missing, because there is no editor. Readers of a paper must know what they are reading, and must critically assess it.
Absolutely. One needs to know what is reading. That’s why pre prints are fine.
High impact factor journals are full of works purposely wrong, made because author wants the results that readers are looking for (that is the easiest way to be published in high impact factor journal).
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/papers-high-impact-journals-have-more-statistical-errors
It’s the game. Reader must know how to navigate the game. Both for peer reviewed papers and pre prints