Review Papers May Matter More Than Experiments

Review Papers May Matter More Than Experiments(evanwarfel.substack.com)

2 points by YossarianFrPrez 94 days ago | 2 comments

I worked in tech for ~8 years and am now finishing up a PhD. One thing that stood out to me is how that in most scientific fields review papers tend to receive more citations than empirical work. This post looks at citation patterns and argues that scientific progress depends just as much on abstraction and synthesis as it does on empirical tests.

PaulHoule 94 days ago | |

When I worked at arXiv I looked at usage statistics that we didn't make public because we didn't want people to get the wrong idea.

One thing we knew is exactly that: the most viewed papers were review papers. You read a lot of them on the road to a PhD.

Another strange thing about review papers is that they escape the usual standards for evaluation in science. That is, as an outsider I can appoint myself to write a review paper without doing any research in the field, and it's possible I could do a very good job. One of the fun things I did in grad school was make a bibliography and short review of papers on the phenomenon of "Giant Magnetoresistance" at the request of the experimentalist on my committee.