"Fastest growing" is usually an annoying statistic. It's really meaningless. Say Germany produced 100,000 scientific studies last year, and this year produced 150,000 studies, they grew at 50%. If Iran produced 1,000 studies last year and this year produced 2,000, they now have a 100% growth, capturing the "fastest growing" title.
If I'm reading graphs right, there were about 300k publications from the US in 2009 and about 10k from Iran, so, about 3% the output of the US, or about 14% adjusted per capita.
(This naturally doesn't argue your point -- I was just curious what the real numbers were.)
Same here, one of the reasons I quit my phd program. I saw how much of the publication volume is bs--it's really hard and rare to produce a meaningful research paper, and that rarity will only increase.
If you go to a top cs conference, chances are 80% of the papers are throw-away...literally no one will read other than the reviewers, and I'm talking about top-conferences let alone the countless lesser known ones. And to be honest, a lot of emerging countries seem to be mass producing a lot of low quality papers in CS, and it's flooding the field. One reason might be how cheap it is to fund a cs research project as opposed to an experimental physics or bio lab.
I find it unhelpful when a single questionable statistic is used to support a complicated thesis. In these cases, it would be better to listen to experts whose opinion is based on a significantly more complicated set of criteria. In that case we still have to judge the quality of the expert, but perhaps if that seems daunting as well then we should perhaps consider ourselves unable to judge the answer at all. I find that more appealing than walking away with a certainty of opinion on the subject of this article.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] thread(This naturally doesn't argue your point -- I was just curious what the real numbers were.)
If you go to a top cs conference, chances are 80% of the papers are throw-away...literally no one will read other than the reviewers, and I'm talking about top-conferences let alone the countless lesser known ones. And to be honest, a lot of emerging countries seem to be mass producing a lot of low quality papers in CS, and it's flooding the field. One reason might be how cheap it is to fund a cs research project as opposed to an experimental physics or bio lab.
As mentioned briefly in the article, citations are probably a much better metric.