What most people fail to realize is that the arrogant “we can solve anything” attitude is a professional necessity. There are no easy problems anymore, and if you don’t approach new problems with a “can-do” attitude then you end up running away in fear…

Another advantage to approaching a new field with a “fresh” perspective is that you don’t know what’s impossible.

Lastly, when physicists do computer science you get the world-wide-web. When lawyers do computer science, you get spam.

p.s. It’s sad to me that Cosma’s extremely thoughtful post has been largely ignored in the subsequent commentary.

You/we cannot make accusations without being able to back it up—it makes the exchange on this website meaningless otherwise. It is also probably illegal!

So if the accusation isn’t completely true, I would have thought the right thing to do is for the accusers to apologize on the website. That is what would happen in a court of law, if this were a libel case!
Then we can all get on with doing far more important things than whinging without proper justification.

Or us poor benighted putative readers?

If pressed, I would suggest that a 100% fair solution might be to give no scientist, even a social one, any credit whatsoever for anything they write. It seems a senseless waste of ink and pixels and breath to claim credit for work that is essentially a rephrasing of common sense and others’ efforts, and that energy and space might be better spent just reinforcing the point of the utterance, instead of so diligently associating it with one’s self and one’s career.

“Alas, it is a sad fact that our work depends on getting credit where it’s due,” will be somme straw person’s response.

Prove it. No, really, I mean it: prove it. I kid you not.

How important is your reputation with the readers? What makes you think your publications have anything to do with it? Do the people who read your publications not already know who you are, and what you will say, and how you will say it before they have finished the abstract? Are you that literary and cunning, to have hidden the mysterious secret at the end of the work?

Or are you just signaling your peers and competitors? Of the rest of us, who are essentially disinterested, how many will read your work at all?

What is the most important target audience, do you think, of academic publication? I would venture that it is the author’s ego. We could save a deal of time by acknowledging that, though of course we would have to revisit the whole process at length in public to do so.

And, by the way, who was it that wrote Cosma’s gem of a satire? I can’t recall the entire bibliographic entry. I know I had it around here somewhere….

Amused, Tozier

This is the sort of thing you can see with some of the folks in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, the ones that do this ignoring of the past and facile data-crunching tend to be the ones who get popular press as well, so they also bring down the reputation of other sociobiology/evo psych people who do the job right. The thing is, they may be partly lazy, but sometimes they seem proud to be ignoring the past work as if it were all tainted and “unscientific”.

Yep. Me, too.

“So I think it is a bit unfair to say that everything physicists are doing has already been done and done better by social scientists, who in many cases don’t have the mathematical backgrounds or interest in specific problems that physicists do.”

I’m almost certain that this is somewhat true, though less so all the time. This is an old, general argument, as mentioned above; and I think both sides have legitimate greivances. Physicists are very arrogant generally and specifically regarding the distinction between what some call “hard science” and “soft science” (the latter which they completely disdain). So there’s little doubt that they long have marched in and ignorantly and arrogantly reinvented the wheel…or worse. Even so, it’s also true that most other sciences have lacked the rigor of physics—and as these sciences have matured those intrusive physicists have probably played an important role. Especially as a science moves into a realm where sophisticated mathematical analysis becomes more worthwhile. And there are of course always entrenched people resisting this and whining about it.

Personally, I think a good example of this is d^2’s complaint above against CS people doing agent simulation in economics. From my perspective, economics is paricularly weak in that it is amenable enough to reductive, physics-like mathematical theory that there has been much more success with this approach than there has been with other social sciences—but ultimately this approach will fail, it’s already failing. I personally don’t think that we’ll achieve mature physics-like basic insights into any of the social sciences by any method other than simulation because of complexity. I think we’ll see success first in economics, because in relative terms, it’s “easy” the same way that physics has been “easy”. In my opinion, which I admit isn’t that humble, most of the other sciences (and particularly the social sciences) are so intractably complex that our current theories are really not (relatively) that much more than narratives. That sounds like a swipe, but it’s not.

So thats the challenge—please cite exactly the source, page and which figure/result in Physica A paper has appeared before
In addition, please state which of the Physica A results is wrong. This will help me understand the physicists ‘mistake’ (if any).

[Just getting technical for a moment in response to an earlier posting, the criticism of ‘removing country bias’ sounds like the economists’ argument of wanting to ‘remove the trend’ from a financial data series. If you don’t know what the series signal is generated by, how can you define what the trend is without adding an additional bias]

I started off as neutral in all this, neither being a physicist or social network scientist—but I’m afraid all the whining and lack of substance in the arguments has made me end up feeling like standing up for the physicists!

As for lack of citation, please continue to complain, but as far as I can tell, the more important issue is whether the work is correct or not, not whether the work cites every possible antecedent work spanning multiple disciplines. I’ve never met an academic who thought they were cited as much as they should have been. I have yet to hear that work done is wrong.

Finally, although I haven’t worked directly on complex networks as a physicist, I’ve read some of the physics literature on it and tried to keep up as a pseudo-hobby (though I’ve almost certainly failed). I have to echo Cosma’s points. Physicists are not interested only in “social networks”. I went to a complex networks session at APS this past March and saw talks on power networks in the US, proteins in fruit flies, and collaboration networks on arxiv.org. These are all things physicists call “complex networks”, but I wager most of the people commenting here have zero interest in protein networks or power networks. So I think it is a bit unfair to say that everything physicists are doing has already been done and done better by social scientists, who in many cases don’t have the mathematical backgrounds or interest in specific problems that physicists do.

This is the big danger in blundering into a field you don’t understand, not that you’ll reinvent the wheel, but that you’ll make idiotic mistakes by failing to follow research procedures that are there for a reason.

Interestingly, the author points out that Watts and Strogatz in their 1998 Nature article also failed to cite the relevant earlier works of many physicists as well.

When you get to potentially boundary-spanning subject like social networks, you’ll also fall down if you don’t know the terminology other groups use. If I call it a spade and you call it a shovel than I’m never going to find what you’ve written about it using my ‘spade’ search term. Cross-disciplinary institutions and groups can help get round this problem, but only if you have the right mix of people, and only if you have access to such groups.

Going by what comes up top in Google (not that we, as good researchers, would do that) leads to the same problem as going by what you see cited elsewhere: what Robert Merton called the ‘Matthew Effect’ is reproduced, and the same authors (or papers) get cited again. Nevertheless, this type of approach—doing what others do—is what a lot of researchers, lacking the time to do a proper literature search, rely on. Calling for better reviewing is fine, but the reviewers and the people writing the papers are the same folks—it’s “peer” reviewing, after all—and it would be naive to suppose that this will straightforwardly lead to better science.

Those “basic scholarly skills” to which John Scott refers are essential, but we have to keep in mind their, and our, limitations.