I am curious as to how things like I am about to describe are handled in the academic and professional world. Is there a protocol that is firmly in place to help minimize this. Lets suppose someone is dedicated to solving a problem, this could be in any field. This person makes a seemingly small discovery that opens things up and changes the entire scope of study. In a very short time others have been able to build on this and overshadows the original discovery into obscurity. Is this a real issue or is it relatively common?
What have you discovered?
From my reads through history, some people are particularly good at spreading ideas and those ideas will often be associated with that person, even if they were not original to him.
In modern times, we’re doing a better job of trying to identify the actual originator of ideas and credit them, but it’s far from perfect since the above is a naturally occurring attribute of human behavior and willingness to perform a deep dive (near nil). If a person hears of something first from Bob, they’re generally going to associate it with Bob. That’s just how we, as a species, do.
The main advantage that we have today, that we didn’t in the past, is that nearly everything we do is documented and preserved. A dedicated investigator will often be able to track down the source of an idea.
In academics/science, isn’t this precisely why you’d publish something like this? Now, going forward, people cite your paper instead or mention the HoneyBadger Constant or whatever, instead of just using the results as if they were axiomatic. Even if they don’t, it’s still proof of being your discovery (or at least proof that you were the first to publish it).
This isn’t really about me, I am working with AI to create models for tribal type social media groups. Trying to minimize the type of competition that can fracture groups while still maintain a forward moving group. I don’t like the concept of using someone and then throwing them away because they have become obsolete.
Yes, this. I worked in a neurophysiology lab as an undergraduate. My boss was constantly looking at how often his various papers had been cited. I published one paper during that time in Brain Research (It was about how serotonin modulated B-Photoreceptor cells in Hermissenda crassicornis. A dry topic, but each time my paper was cited I felt a little rush. I haven’t looked at that work in decades.
I agree that the number of citations people get is nearly all-important in science and medicine. Somewhat less so in other fields, where papers are critical but books also count highly.
In the modern world, its considered basic to cite the originating paper for something that opens up a field. Sometimes that understanding may take years or even decades but eventually it appears. I’m pretty sure peer reviewers would question that lack. With today’s databases very little gets forgotten.
Citations can be gamed, as can the sheer number of papers, but it’s hard to put anything above them.
“Author reputation is key in driving a paper’s citation count early in its life cycle, before a tipping point, after which reputation has much less influence compared to the paper’s citation count,” says Aalto University Professor Santo Fortunato, pointing out that this is a key finding of the study.
In working with patents, I think it’s somewhat common. And example is this fellow:
He discovered that you could alter the refractive index of an optical fiber by illuminating it with UV light, and that lead to all sorts of new and useful developments in fiber optic systems. He was cited as prior art on all sorts of fiber optic patents for probably the first twenty years after that.
On the topic of author reputation, the neurophysiology lab phone rang one day and I answered it. It was Eric Kandel calling from Columbia University for my boss, who wasn’t there. (Kandel was Mr Neuroscience at the time)
I grabbed a marker and wrote his name and number on the dry erase board.
When my boss returned to the lab, I told him Eric Kandel had called. I’d already copied the number onto a piece of paper, so I picked up an eraser and walked over to the board. He stopped me. “No, leave that there”.
Over the next few weeks several other scientists on the floor approached me when my boss wasn’t around, casually asking me if I knew why Kandel had called.
Citations do count, but in most cases the original paper about an idea has some basic results, but future work usually expands on it. The one exception I’m aware of is that Shannon’s work on information theory was so complete that my information theory professor said that everyone else just improved on his proofs.
The dual of being the person who first solves a problem is being the person who wraps up a problem. In grad school we wrote some papers that were basically the last ones in the area. It was kind of satisfying to hear someone say at a conference a few years later “that’s a solved problem.”
The one truly original thing I ever did (not based on anyone else’s work) led to other people exploiting it since I had other interests. When I asked ChatGPT who discovered it, my name was not mentioned. If you google it, my name does not appear. One difficulty is that I did not name the discovery; others did.
Another example is entirely my fault. I made a certain construction, not really original but modified from a construction done 30 years earlier. I didn’t think it important and I asked a grad student, call then X, to study it and he did, for his master’s thesis and it was published as an appendix to a set of lecture notes I published. I never thought it very important (boy was I wrong about that!) so when the person who pointed out how important it was asked me what to call it, I said to call it the X construction. Which he did and that is how it is known to this day. Meantime, X finished his PhD–on another subject–and has never done any more research in his life.