What Counts as Paper-Padding in Academic Research Today?

One day, an academic heavyweight wrote a paper titled Tomatoes Are All Eggs Need, which for the first time proposed the method of making tomato fried eggs.

People around him immediately started following up:

Organic Tomato Fried Eggs

Tomato Fried Duck Eggs / Goose Eggs / Quail Eggs

Cherry Tomato Fried Eggs

Soy Sauce Tomato Fried Eggs

Oil-Free Tomato Fried Eggs

A Study on the Sensitivity of Tomato Fried Eggs to Sugar Content

Spices Markedly Improve the Aroma of Tomato Fried Eggs (thyme / basil / star anise / Sichuan peppercorn / green Sichuan pepper oil / chili / garlic fried eggs)

Using Vinegar and Lemon to Compensate for Acidity

A Metric for Testing Insufficient Diversity in Tomato Fried Eggs

These papers still could not really be called paper-padding. After all, they did explore many directions. But in most cases, the flavor improved by only one or two percentage points along a few axes.

Half a year later, the heavyweight’s lab published a second paper: Tomato Paste Is All Tomato Fried Eggs Need.

The intuition was simple. Today’s tomatoes are picked early for transportation, so their ripeness, acidity, and tomato flavor are all insufficient. The lab therefore invented the method of adding tomato paste while frying the eggs, and achieved SOTA (state of the art) across all evaluation metrics.

The community then made a pile of small fixes to tomato fried eggs, but none produced a meaningful improvement in flavor over tomato paste.

So the direction of publication gradually changed. People turned instead to edge-case applications, safety, and similar benchmark leaderboards:

Cooking Tomato Fried Eggs on a Small Home Stove

Cooking Tomato Fried Eggs over a Campfire

Fireless Tomato Fried Eggs

Cold-Dressed Tomato and Eggs

Tomato with Raw Egg

Robust to adversarial eggs: A Stability Study (if the eggs are maliciously selected bad eggs, the result is still edible)

Anti-Expired Tomato Fried Eggs

Tomato Fried Anti-Expired Eggs

Multi-Pan Egg Frying Without Violating Other Pans’ Privacy, a.k.a. Federated Stir-Frying

…

To be honest, much of this research is meaningless, because it sacrifices too much flavor.

The first priority in cooking is always that the food tastes good. If it does not taste good, every edge scenario will be abandoned.

Who fries eggs when they do not have a stove? Who would not pick out the bad eggs before frying?

As for federated stir-frying… since when has your pan cared about the privacy of another pan?

By this point, the original paper had already surpassed one thousand citations.

Seeing how hot the direction had become, researchers from other fields also started entering the area.

A Thermodynamic Analysis of Tomato Fried Eggs

A Chemical Composition Analysis of Tomato Fried Eggs

An Alkaloid Analysis of Tomato Fried Eggs

The Philosophical Principles of Tomato Fried Eggs

Tomato Egg Drop Soup (so interdisciplinary work can still produce good papers. I love tomato egg drop soup.)

Accelerating Tomato Fried Eggs with a Novel Coated Pan

Tomato-Egg Steak Sauce

Tomato, Ginseng, Angelica, and Egg Instant Powder

Tomato-Egg Face Mask

…

Through the collective effort of countless people, tomato fried eggs finally left the lab and entered industry.

Restaurants large and small began making this delicious dish, giving customers the pleasure of its flavor.

Among the thousands of researchers behind those thousands of papers, a lucky few caught the eye of restaurant owners and went to industry as interns.

When they arrived at the restaurants, they were genuinely shocked. The scale was completely different from what they had seen in their own labs.

A typical lab only had a tiny electric stove, a few hundred watts at most. In a restaurant, the stove was practically a planetary engine that could boil a whole pot of water in five seconds.

In the lab, when stir-frying, you dared to add only two spoonfuls of oil at a time. In the restaurant, the smallest unit of “wide oil” was a bucket.

In the lab, you fried the same dish three or five times, compared the results, and got ready to submit the paper. In the restaurant, there was an entire team of chefs researching this one dish alone. Every evaluation involved at least two hundred plates in different flavors, with more than a hundred data-labeling workers invited to run the tests.

There were hundreds of evaluation metrics. It was nothing like academia, where clearing three metrics was usually enough.

The restaurant owner walked over with a smile and said:

“Dr. X, we read your paper, Tomato Fried Fluffy Eggs, and found it extremely helpful for our team.

“You must not fail the company’s expectations. You should know that your intern salary is twice as high as that of the master chefs who have been doing this for ten years.”

The owner then gave the researcher several requirements.

First, how can we use only one egg to make one plate of tomato fried eggs, while still making customers feel there are many eggs and that the dish is worth the money?

Second, how can we improve the egg-frying process so the dish goes out in three and a half minutes instead of three minutes and fifty seconds?

Third, how can we enable chefs to cook in parallel, running two stoves, four stoves, or even sixteen stoves at the same time?

Only then did he realize how different industry was from academia.

So-called paper-padding is what happens when, in the absence of good ideas or fundamental innovation, people simply pile up labor and resources to run experiments, or propose unrealistic scenarios.

This kind of research may not contribute much to humanity, but the paper looks proper and the experiments are detailed. A reviewer takes one look, and through it goes.

Still, truth often takes time to prove. A reviewer’s understanding is limited, and reviewing only takes an hour or two. How could he know whether this paper will open a new era or be thrown into the trash heap of academia?

Besides, the good ideas of academic heavyweights may often originate from these paper-padding papers. If those experiments had not blocked off all the wrong roads, how would the heavyweights know which road was the right one?