Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2023 January 29

= January 29 =

Tracing a recent scientific paper
A few years ago, a paper was published in a pretty prestigious journal that took a scathing dig at the publish-or-perish culture in science and the resulting often-useless research. In their field, there was a proliferation of little-novel papers on generating composites of two or more elements, subjecting them to a set of standard tests, and reporting the results. The authors explained how and why such an approach had nothing to offer except the publication of C(118,2) + C(118,3) + ... papers! I recall that the paper attracted immense attention from pop media and probably, had a title with the f-word.

Now that I have forgotten all recognizable details about the paper (journal/author/field), what was it? TrangaBellam (talk) 14:36, 29 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Probably in a journal of American Chemical Society! TrangaBellam (talk) 14:43, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
 * @TrangaBellam I used Google Scholar to look for a few of the keywords in your question. I don't think I found the exact paper you had in mind but this one is open-access and has lots of references. You could play around in Scholar to come up with other possibilities. Mike Turnbull (talk) 15:23, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I know of that but failed to retrieve the paper. This is far from the paper, I have in mind. TrangaBellam (talk) 15:36, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Resolved courtesy a colleague from another department.
 * The article is TrangaBellam (talk) 17:22, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
 * These guys are hilarious! They actually used "crap" (guano) in their sarcasmfest! Clarityfiend (talk) 00:11, 31 January 2023 (UTC)