Paranoia has been such a great inspiration for Art, including of course memorable song lyrics like these:
Girl, I want you here with me
But I'm really not as cool as I'd like to be
'cause there's a red, under my bed..
Paranoia, the destroyer
Paranoia, the destroyer
-- the Kinks
Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's coming to get me
Just say you never met me
I'm running underground with the moles
Digging in holes
-- Harvey Danger (original erroneous attribution corrected)
(Feel free to submit your favorite mention of paranoia in a song, poem, or other artistic venue.)
But what of the role of paranoia in our daily lives as scholars and teachers?
A reader wrote to me wondering: Is there a healthy level of paranoia that we should maintain to protect our work and, as advisers, the work of our students and postdocs? Or should we try to trust everyone as much as possible, despite occasional reminders that some people really are out to get us?
I have worked with extremely paranoid people from time to time, and I know that I don't want to be like them. I had one colleague for a while who did not even trust me to know everything relevant to the project we were supposedly working on together. He was very secretive, even lying at times to protect information he thought I would steal from him and .. well, I don't really know what he thought I would do with it, other than use it for the work we were doing together. He had no basis for not trusting me in particular; he was like that with everyone.
He was so afraid that people would steal our work (or something) that he constantly criticized me for telling other people "too much" about our research. We annoyed each other at approximately equal and elevated levels, wrote one paper together, and that was it for me. From time to time he has approached me about new projects to work on together, but I always say no. I have told him that our working styles are not compatible and I am too busy stealing other people's research.
I also have a daily reminder about another incident involving Paranoia. The lock on my office door is a special kind that was installed years ago because a postdoc was breaking into my office, stealing things, and hacking into my computer because s/he wanted to find out what I was doing/saying about him/her. Perhaps I was stealing the postdoc's research? Perhaps I was writing mean things about the postdoc in unsolicited letters to other universities? Alas, the lack of evidence for any of these activities did not assuage the postdoc's paranoia, nor did all the cute photos of my cats.
That situation was extremely unpleasant and could have resulted in my being permanently paranoid about postdocs, but in fact I have found that I do not assume in advance that all postdocs will break into my office. The only reason I haven't gone back to a standard lock is because I just haven't bothered. If I did go back to a standard lock, I am certain that I would not spend my days worrying that psycho postdocs were rummaging around in my office when I wasn't there.
But what about more usual situations, such as when we send papers and proposals out for review, or plan the content of a talk? How paranoid should we be? I know from experience that some people will use ideas from unpublished research and try to scoop the original authors, but, in my experience, these have been rare events. I try to put my absolute best ideas and data into manuscripts, proposals, and talks, preferring instead to communicate these things rather than worry about the potential actions of unethical evil-doers.
I have always done so; it's not just a tenured professor luxury thing. It is my preferred mode of working.
I can do this in part because my research has little to no immediate economic value (i.e., no patents will result), and that surely simplifies things for me. The decisions I make are therefore primarily influenced by (1) my relatively low level of daily paranoia, and (2) my wish to communicate my best research results as soon as I am confident about them.
And, except in the most egregious cases (some described in earlier posts), I let it slide even if I suspect that someone is pursuing research that was "inspired" by one of my proposals, or manuscripts in review, or talks about work in progress. We all get ideas from each other in various ways, and it's not worth spending time having paranoid thoughts about the competition. I'd rather just keep doing my work in the best (yet most efficient) way that I can, and confine my paranoid obsessing to a bit of ranting over a double espresso with a colleague now and then.
Google Scholar v. Web of Science
From the comments to yesterday's post:
ISI/Web of Science (WoS) is " better than Google Scholar by an order of magnitude."
"..my citations are definitely higher on Scopus than on WoS."
"Web of Science has a few errors in my records, though not nearly as bad as Google Scholar.."
"I prefer Google Scholar.. My prediction is that WOS will decline in popularity over time unless it makes drastic changes."
OK, so let's do the numbers.
I compared citation data in Google Scholar and Web of Science for 25 of my publications. (I did not search in Scopus).
I looked at a range of publications in terms of publication date, my place in the authorship order, and type of publication. For 18 of the 25 publications, Web of Science counted more citations, so I definitely like WoS better. For these 18, Google Scholar's citation count ranged between 0-92% of the citations in WoS; the average was 62%.
For 3 of the 25, Google Scholar counted the same number as WoS, and for 4 others Google Scholar counted more citations, although typically only slightly more than WoS (84-92%). There aren't enough data for me to conclude anything systematic based on these small numbers, but I was intrigued by the fact that 2 of the publications that had a higher citation count in GS than in WoS were in topics outside my primary research field.
The publications for which Google Scholar did a significantly worse job of finding citations than WoS --i.e., finding <40% of the citations listed in WoS -- were typically in my oldest publications and in my most recent publications, although there is one paper published in 2002 in a mainstream journal for which GS found <40% of the citations listed in WoS.
These results are not surprising; it is not news that these sites are not perfect at counting citations.
These databases are very useful for doing literature searches, and should be used primarily for this purpose rather than as key data in decision-making about jobs, promotions, and awards. Nevertheless, I have been on committees in which various members exclusively used one or the other of these sites for looking up the publication records of applicants/nominees, and I have seen citation numbers listed in many CVs and in letters of recommendation (typically without reference to which citation index was used to determine those numbers).
To some extent, this is OK. A very high number of citations is impressive, whether it is 250 or 320. For some of my papers with more modest numbers of citations, though, I might as well just make up a number between 5 and 50 than rely on the count in either Google Scholar or Web of Science.
Even so, for my field (or subfield) of the physical sciences, Web of Science is definitely "better" at counting citations for most publications. For those of you who prefer GS to WoS, perhaps you could leave a comment indicating your field. Are there particular fields for which GS is better at finding citations?
ISI/Web of Science (WoS) is " better than Google Scholar by an order of magnitude."
"..my citations are definitely higher on Scopus than on WoS."
"Web of Science has a few errors in my records, though not nearly as bad as Google Scholar.."
"I prefer Google Scholar.. My prediction is that WOS will decline in popularity over time unless it makes drastic changes."
OK, so let's do the numbers.
I compared citation data in Google Scholar and Web of Science for 25 of my publications. (I did not search in Scopus).
I looked at a range of publications in terms of publication date, my place in the authorship order, and type of publication. For 18 of the 25 publications, Web of Science counted more citations, so I definitely like WoS better. For these 18, Google Scholar's citation count ranged between 0-92% of the citations in WoS; the average was 62%.
For 3 of the 25, Google Scholar counted the same number as WoS, and for 4 others Google Scholar counted more citations, although typically only slightly more than WoS (84-92%). There aren't enough data for me to conclude anything systematic based on these small numbers, but I was intrigued by the fact that 2 of the publications that had a higher citation count in GS than in WoS were in topics outside my primary research field.
The publications for which Google Scholar did a significantly worse job of finding citations than WoS --i.e., finding <40% of the citations listed in WoS -- were typically in my oldest publications and in my most recent publications, although there is one paper published in 2002 in a mainstream journal for which GS found <40% of the citations listed in WoS.
These results are not surprising; it is not news that these sites are not perfect at counting citations.
These databases are very useful for doing literature searches, and should be used primarily for this purpose rather than as key data in decision-making about jobs, promotions, and awards. Nevertheless, I have been on committees in which various members exclusively used one or the other of these sites for looking up the publication records of applicants/nominees, and I have seen citation numbers listed in many CVs and in letters of recommendation (typically without reference to which citation index was used to determine those numbers).
To some extent, this is OK. A very high number of citations is impressive, whether it is 250 or 320. For some of my papers with more modest numbers of citations, though, I might as well just make up a number between 5 and 50 than rely on the count in either Google Scholar or Web of Science.
Even so, for my field (or subfield) of the physical sciences, Web of Science is definitely "better" at counting citations for most publications. For those of you who prefer GS to WoS, perhaps you could leave a comment indicating your field. Are there particular fields for which GS is better at finding citations?
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