Paper on scientometrics

[Paul Colin de Gloucester]

On July 26th, 2013, David Wojick emailed:
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Good point, Paul, but are the confusions you report due to the complex fog|
|of revolution or something simpler?                                        |
|                                                                           |
|David"                                                                     |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I think it is fair to say that confusion can easily happen by people
not doing sufficient reading instead of being caused by revolution. I
think this can also happen during revolution.

One of the most important items which I cited in "Referees Often Miss
Obvious Errors in Computer and Electronic Publications" is:
Kay, A. C. (1997). The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet. In
"The 12th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming,
Systems, Languages, and Applications".
A. C. Kay is a visionary and despite his choice of the title "The
Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", many experts consider work
by him from the 1970's (much of this 1997 keynote speech was about
that work) to be revolutionary. It certainly had a profound influence
from the 1990's to the present, whether or not it fulfills the
criteria for a revolution.

An excerpt from "Referees Often Miss Obvious Errors in Computer and
Electronic Publications" follows. Most of this excerpt is unrelated to
A. C. Kay but might be related to revolutions:
"[. . .]
Many authors consider it to be safer to follow a trend (Fang,
2011). However, Fang (2011) suggested that the chosen trend would be
of hypotheses which are likely to be confirmed, in contrast to the
current paper's findings that the untrue bases of trends can continue
to be chosen by authors years after they had been disproved. Fang
(2011) underestimated its own contribution to science: the present
article shows that mainstream monopolies ruin the literature's
signal-to-noise ratio even for uncomplicated cases. Procedures become
popular despite evidence that they are not beneficial (Frader, 2002).
[. . .]
Relman (1983) proposed that refereeing is likely to uncover
"inherently contradictory" typescripts. I disprove this by pointing
out that SystemC(R) articles and other articles claiming object
orientation in static languages are hundreds and thousands
(respectively) of "inherently contradictory" articles which exceed "N"
rays (David, 1997); the J-phenomenon (Alexander, 1930); and anomalous
water (Ziman, 1978) in terms of articles and longevity. Others argued
that popularity and a large quantity of citations are indicative of
merit, but as the hundreds of citations to self-contradictory articles
exposed in the present work show: truth is not a popularity contest,
not even among people employed to be scientists (Campanario, 2009).
Type-I errors which a competent referee could have trivially detected
are not restricted to a short range of years.
Type-I errors are correlated with citations."

Most of "Referees Often Miss Obvious Errors in Computer and Electronic
Publications" consists of documenting distortion by many people of
work by A. C. Kay.