{"id":40,"date":"2003-11-26T19:02:26","date_gmt":"2003-11-26T09:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/?p=40"},"modified":"2003-11-26T19:02:26","modified_gmt":"2003-11-26T09:02:26","slug":"wither-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wither-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Wither research?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a note related to the previous post, Lance Fortnow<\/a> has a recent post (“Editors Needed”, Nov 17, 2003) suggesting ways in which researchers can help make the best ideas in a research field more prominent.<\/p>\n

One idea Lance suggests is for researchers to take time out to write review papers.<\/p>\n

I’d like to add that not only is this a very helpful thing to do, sometimes it’s critical to the survival of a field.<\/p>\n

I suspect there’s many once-thriving subdisciplines of science essentially lost to humanity because no well-written comprehensive review distilling the major ideas of the field was ever written.<\/p>\n

In my own field, there’s an example where this could conceivably happen: the so-called “theory of entanglement”. This topic was very fashionable from 1996-2001 or so, with hundreds of papers, but lately interest seems to have cooled. Some reviews of parts of the field have been written, but no comprehensive, well-thought out review exists that I know of. I wonder what will survive in ten years time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a note related to the previous post, Lance Fortnow has a recent post (“Editors Needed”, Nov 17, 2003) suggesting ways in which researchers can help make the best ideas in a research field more prominent. One idea Lance suggests is for researchers to take time out to write review papers. I’d like to add… Continue reading Wither research?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}