On this day in 1998, 26 freaking years ago, I started writing this blog. I’ve talked at you a lot about the site recently, so I’ll be brief. Last year on this anniversary, I wrote:
My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence.
And still having fun. Perhaps more fun than ever. Thanks to all of you for being a part of it.
P.S. I hope you’ll forgive me taking advantage of any 26-years!-I-love-this-place! feelings you might have today to ask that if you find value in what I do here, I’d appreciate if you’d support the site by purchasing a membership. And to everyone who has supported the site over the years, thank you so much!
MICROBIOME NEWS: Unlocking the Secrets of Aging: Researchers Reveal Key to Intestinal Balance
Workings Center on Regulation and Markets working paper. (Dis)information wars. Adrian Casillas, Maryam Farboodi, Layla Hashemi, Maryam Saeedi, and Steven Wilson.February 29, 2024.
“With the unprecedented rise of internet access across the globe, social media platforms have emerged as prominent vehicles for displaying dissent. In response, numerous entities engage in spreading fake news on these platforms. We focus on a specific form of disinformation supply on social media—disinformation wars: the intentional spread of fake news while pretending to be an ordinary account. We demonstrate that this new form of disinformation supply is considerably more effective in spreading fake news on X, formerly known as Twitter, compared to traditional propaganda.
We then propose a novel approach to preempt the spread by assigning a disinformation score to accounts and assess the effectiveness of the score disclosure policy in limiting the spread of disinformation on the platform.”
Chronicle of Higher Education [The Dark World of Citation Cartels unpaywalledunpaywalled]: “In the complex landscape of modern academe, the maxim “publish or perish” has been gradually evolving into a different mantra: “Get cited or your career gets blighted.” Citations are the new academic currency, and careers now firmly depend on this form of scholarly recognition. In fact, citation has become so important that it has driven a novel form of trickery: stealth networks designed to manipulate citations.
Researchers, driven by the imperative to secure academic impact, resort to forming citation rings: collaborative circles engineered to artificially boost the visibility of their work. In doing so, they compromise the integrity of academic discourse and undermine the foundation of scholarly pursuit. The story of the modern “citation cartel” is not just a result of publication pressure. The rise of the mega-journal also plays a role, as do predatory journals and institutional efforts to thrive in global academic rankings. Over the past decade, the landscape of academic research has been significantly altered by the sheer number of scholars engaging in scientific endeavors. The number of scholars contributing to indexed publications in mathematics has doubled, for instance.
In response to the heightened demand for space in scientific publications, a new breed of publishing entrepreneur has seized the opportunity, and the result is the rise of mega-journals that publish thousands of articles annually. Mathematics, an open-access journal produced by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, published more than 4,763 articles in 2023, making up 9.3 percent of all publications in the field, according to the Web of Science.
It has an impact factor of 2.4 and an article-influence measure of just 0.37, but, crucially, it is indexed with Clarivate’s Web of Science, Elsevier’s Scopus, and other indexers, which means its citations count toward a variety of professional metrics. (By contrast, the Annals of Mathematics, published by Princeton University, contained 22 articles last year, and has an impact factor of 4.9 and an article-influence measure of 8.3.)..
One important citation metric targeted for citational gamesmanship is Clarivate’s prestigious “Highly Cited Researchers” list. “Of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers™ are 1 in 1,000,” Clarivate explains. Inclusion on the list occurs first via citation activity: “Each researcher selected has authored multiple Highly Cited Papers™ which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s).” That list is then “refined using qualitative analysis and expert judgment.” By and large, Clarivate’s label of Highly Cited Researcher is recognized by the research community as a marker of influence…”
