KellyBullard_A1

For my interview, I spoke with Dr. Faheem Gilani, a researcher at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. Gilani has a PhD in Mathematics from Penn State where he was a researcher for several years before leaving to pursue his PhD in Economics. While discussing changes in scholarly communications, we agreed on three areas where practices are actively changing. These were: collaboration, online presence, and intended research impact. Dr. Gilani identified early and mid-career researchers and the pandemic as the main driving forces behind these changes.

Dr. Gilani began by explaining that a growing number of early career researchers co-author with senior researchers and faculty in order to publish in influential journals. “If you want to be successful or just survive really, you need to be cited. Often. So, groups of researchers form. Being identified with other researchers gives us clout, and when one person gets funding or recognition, the rest benefit by association. Colleagues, or former schoolmates, who are already interested in similar topics and then their advisees and research assistants combine forces do research that would be too labor intensive for one researcher alone.” According to Dr. Gilani, due to Covid, much of that collaboration happened and continues to happen via video conference. For early career researchers, this has other benefits. Reviewers who might have otherwise been anonymous are more easily identified, influencing the review process for publications.

Dr. Gilani spoke also about a collective shift in the field towards data sharing: “There’s a move towards toward more centralized open-source work with prints made available on platforms like arXiv. Early on, it was very frustrating to read papers where I had to search all over the place to find the source code. Currently, there are so many published papers out there whose results I would have loved to verify on my own but just couldn’t do so because the code was not made readily and fully available. These days the authors of these papers are very nice and more than happy to send me a copy of the relevant MATLAB files, but in the past, some would just ignore my email. Often, the issue would be that I needed to verify a particular subsection of the paper using the code, but the available code would not have the results in that subsection. Without the code, I have no way of knowing if their ‘Temporal Convolution Wavenet Network’ or whatever actually works the way they claimed. So, the move to open source is just better.” Data sharing: observational data that is interpreted. Open Science is about sharing it all; your data, your methods, your statistical analysis; this is all more possible due to digitization of all these parts of the process.

Dr. Gilani admits that he does not have a significant professional social media presence but recognized that the way scholars in the field of mathematics present themselves online is changing. “Blogs are big in the mathematics community. Some leaders in the field have blogs with large followings, but mid- and early career researchers maintain social media presences on twitter and discords.” According to Gilani, there is a budding informal community of mathematicians who discuss research ideas and make connections via these platforms.

When returning to our discussion of publications, Dr. Gilani was adamant that the intended scope of mathematics research has changed dramatically. Rather than striving for the attention of the public, researchers aim to impact the field and their scholarly peers. Due to funding scarcity and pressures from a competitive job market, researchers focus on the “recipe for job security: publications and citations.”

Dr. Gilani’s insight into the changes and challenges surrounding scholarly communications in Mathematics point to interesting emerging dynamics and tensions between established research and communication practices and the navigation of researcher saturated publication environments: new scholars attempting to reimagine and informalize the field’s communication practices and change tempered by funding scarcity and job insecurity.

References:

Bullard, Kelly. Interview with Faheem Gilani. Personal Interview. Zoom, 16 October 2021.

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