Scientific Papers: Innovation or Imitation?

Summary

Sometimes a paper comes out that has the seeds of a great idea that could lead to a whole new line of pioneering research. But, instead, nothing much happens, except imitative works that do not push the core idea forward at all. For example the McCulloch Pitts paper from 1943 showed how neural networks could represent arbitrary logical or Boolean expressions of a certain class. The paper was well-received at the time, brilliantly executed by co-authors with diverse expertise in neuroscience, logic and computing. Had its signficance been fully grasped, this paper might have, at least notionally, formed a unifying conceptual bridge between the two nascent schools of connectionism and symbolic AI (one can at least hope). But instead, the heated conflict in viewpoints in the field has persisted, even to this day. Another example is George Miller’s 7 +/- 2 paper. This famous result showed humans are able to hold only a small number of pieces of information in mind at the same time while reasoning. This paper was important not just for the specific result, but for the breakthrough in methodology using rigorous experimental noninvasive methods to discover how human thinking works—a topic we know so little about, even today. However, the followup papers by others, for the most part, only extended or expanded on the specific finding in very minor ways. [1] Thankfully, Miller’s approach did eventually gain influence in more subtle ways. Of course it’s natural from the incentive structures of publishing that many papers would be primarily derivative rather than original. It’s not a bad thing that, when a pioneering paper comes out, others very quickly write rejoinder papers containing evaluations or minor tweaks of the original result. Not bad, but sometimes we miss the larger implications of the original result and get lost in the details. Another challenge is stovepiping—we get stuck in our narrow swim lanes for our specific fields and camps of research. [2] We don’t see the...