Does Your Paper Really Suck?

Academic peer review has been broken forever and AI appears to be the final 1 ton tungston rod that will break the camels back. The wave of AI generated papers is crushing this years conference cycle and the traditional academic preference for opaque, ponderous papers over clear, straightforward ones means we are going to get heaps of even worse rubbish than in the past.

Bad time for me to decide to get a PhD!

"These are important questions because scientists are increasingly overwhelmed with the volume of new work posted on preprint servers and published in journals. As a result, traditional quality signals used for triaging papers, such as journal, conference venue, and institution, are becoming less reliable."

The diagnosis is right but the treat is dead wrong. Instead of silly scoring systems, please improve recommender systems for papers. In this space, also opt-in and query-based personalization would be okay.

What’s concerning about the single QED score aside from the arguments in the paper is that it’s likely a ploy for QED to sell their paper validation solutions.

In a future where QED scores gain traction, every researcher will need a QED validator subscription to score their paper before publishing. Allowing researchers to tweak their papers for a higher score, potentially without substantial changes to their discovery.

Interesting but immoral customer acquisition tactic.

To save people the bother:

An LLM read a paper and concluded it was a top 1% paper.

Everyone involved were happy.