So you are getting crushed on the internet? The new normal for academics.

Jeff Leek
2015-11-16

Roger and I were just talking about all the discussion around the Case and Deaton paper on death rates for middle class people. Andrew Gelman discussed it among many others. They noticed a potential bias in the analysis and did some re-analysis. Just yesterday Noah Smith wrote a piece about academics versus blogs and how many academics are taken by surprise when they see their paper being discussed so rapidly on the internet. Much of the debate comes down to the speed, tone, and ferocity of internet discussion of academic work - along with the fact that sometimes it isn’t fully fleshed out.

I have been seeing this play out not just in the case of this specific paper, but many times that folks have been confronted with blogs or the quick publication process of f1000Research. I think it is pretty scary for folks who aren’t used to “internet speed” to see this play out and I thought it would be helpful to make a few points.

  1. Everyone is an internet scientist now. The internet has arrived as part of academics and if you publish a paper that is of interest (or if you are a Nobel prize winner, or if you dispute a claim, etc.) you will see discussion of that paper within a day or two on the blogs. This is now a fact of life.
  2. The internet loves a fight. The internet responds best to personal/angry blog posts or blog posts about controversial topics like p-values, errors, and bias. Almost certainly if someone writes a blog post about your work or an f1000 paper it will be about an error/bias/correction or something personal.
  3. Takedowns are easier than new research and happen faster. It is much, much easier to critique a paper than to design an experiment, collect data, figure out what question to ask, ask it quantitatively, analyze the data, and write it up. This doesn’t mean the critique won’t be good/right it just means it will happen much much faster than it took you to publish the paper because it is easier to do. All it takes is noticing one little bug in the code or one error in the regression model. So be prepared for speed in the response.

In light of these three things, you have a couple of options about how to react if you write an interesting paper and people are discussing it - which they will certainly do (point 1), in a way that will likely make you uncomfortable (point 2), and faster than you’d expect (point 3). The first thing to keep in mind is that the internet wants you to “fight back” and wants to declare a “winner”. Reading about amicable disagreements doesn’t build audience. That is why there is reality TV. So there will be pressure for you to score points, be clever, be fast, and refute every point or be declared the loser. I have found from my own experience that is what I feel like doing too. I think that resisting this urge is both (a) very very hard and (b) the right thing to do. I find the best solution is to be proud of your work, but be humble, because no paper is perfect and thats ok. If you do the best you can , sensible people will acknowledge that.

I think these are the three ways to respond to rapid internet criticism of your work.

All of this only applies if you write a paper that a ton of people care about/is controversial. Many technical papers won’t have this issue and if you keep your claims small, this also probably won’t apply. But I thought it was useful to try to work out how to act under this “new normal”.