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Here’s yet another post about bad papers. I’ve commented on a similar topic before. At the time I thought it was really important to call out bad scholarship publicly. It seems like tenured professors are in a unique position to do this, but standards of decorum often get in the way.  That’s why including “bad” papers in a course might be potentially useful if done correctly.

In the interim I’ve learned quite a bit more about science than I knew before, and I suspect that identifying papers as “bad” is often a subjective judgement based on personal biases and community norms. Papers can include mistakes, such as a faulty proof, that would render them objectively bad. But consider this, are papers before a paradigm shift bad? Certainly, in the context in which the papers were published and read, they were considered “good”, and yet a retroactive evaluations of these papers (post-shift) would probably evaluate them in the context of a changed understanding of the relevant scientific theory. In that sense, pre-shift papers could be then considered “bad.”

[And so, even in the hardest of the hard sciences, the quality of a paper can shift with time even though the paper itself stays the same.]

[As a personal example, a professor in my program brought up the topic of a paper that he thought was terrible. The paper demonstrated a process by which programs can be jointly compiled so that when run together in some form of multitasking environment the programs would use fewer resources. At the time, this did not seem like an important problem. Yet now we live in the era of the iPhone. Last I heard, this professor is now at Microsoft. I wonder if he took his narrow vision of computing with him. ]

Maybe you don’t buy Kuhn’s ideas on science, but you would still need some kind of objective basis for forming conclusions about “good” and “bad” papers. And you’d have to recognize at least the possibility that subjective norms could seep into whatever standard you set.

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