My Cues For Identifying Unhelpful Physics Papers (And Interesting Ones)

I skim the preprints at arXiv in astrophysics, general relativity, HEP-experiment, HEP-Lattice, and HEP-phenomenology almost every single day (going back to look at days I missed when I can't) and have done so for years.

There are lots of papers published, that in my personal, subjective, educated layman's view, are barking up the wrong tree in a line of research that I find to be unlikely to reflect reality and in that sense dubious. 

I mean this without denigrating the fact that these papers are mostly written by legitimate professional PhD physics researchers and represent predominately accurate and good faith efforts to apply their knowledge to unsolved problems in physics. These parts are often good enough if one makes the assumptions associated with that subfield, but I simply don't think that these subfields and the assumptions or conjectures behind them are correct.

Some of this is driven purely by my own informed intuition, even though I can't rigorously establish that these lines of inquiry are wrong. Others have been long disfavored by observational evidence that the authors choose to ignore or overlook for some reason. And, capricious as I am, sometimes something else about a paper that would generally seem unhelpful cause it to capture my attention anyway, usually in some aspect of the paper unrelated to the unhelpful parts.

I'll call these "unhelpful" physics papers. Also, to be clear, there are plenty of papers that are not in the "unhelpful" category, but simply aren't in an area of physics that I'm particularly interested in. 

For example, astronomy searches for exoplanets or analysis of how exoplanets form (that don't implicate new physics) are perfectly legitimate "helpful" papers, but I simply don't care much about the search for exoplanets or the process by which they form, since my main area of interest is the question to improve our understanding of the laws of physics themselves. Similarly, I am rarely interested in papers that recount new astronomy data without any meaningful analysis of it (it may be important, but I'm not skilled enough to analyze it without professional astronomer assistance). Likewise, HEP-experiment papers that discover and characterized new hadrons whose existence and properties are predicted by the Standard Model are "helpful" but just not all that interesting given my core interests.

Another class of papers which I largely ignore, although they are also not "unhelpful" in this sense, are papers discussing proposed new physics experiments that haven't reached the construction phase. Similarly, I don't pay much attention to highly technical instrumentation upgrade papers (in astronomy as well as HEP).

I identify "interesting papers" mostly by process of elimination, although some classes of papers, like measurements of Standard Model physical constants, analyses of the nature of scalar and axial vector mesons, modified gravity explanations of dark matter and dark energy phenomena, and mirror gravity cosmology papers are presumptively interesting.

One class of papers that hovers between the unhelpful and uninteresting category is the class of papers focusing on gravity and modified gravity theories in the very strong field regime (e.g. near black holes and neutron stars). I suspect that old fashioned classical GR does a very good job in this context, and in general, I'm just not all that interested in black holes.

What are some of the cues I use to determine that a preprint or paper is "unhelpful." Some papers have multiple "unhelpful" flags.

* Papers that discuss a see-saw mechanism for neutrino mass. See, e.g., here.

* Papers that analyze Majorana mass for neutrinos theoretically. See, e.g., here.

* Papers that propose "right handed" and/or "sterile" neutrinos. See, e.g., here and here.

* Papers that propose new GeV scale or more massive dark matter candidates. See, e.g., here and here.

* Papers that think we need new post-Big Bang physics to explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe. See, e.g., here.

* Supersymmetry models. See, e.g., here.

* String theory models. See, e.g., here.

* Lie Group based GUT and TOE models.

* Papers proposing new Higgs bosons in addition to the Standard Model Higgs boson (although papers ruling them out in some new parameter space deserve a passing glance). See, e.g., here.

* Papers exploring cosmological inflation models.

* Papers that propose leptoquarks. See, e.g., here.

* Papers discussing theories that give rise to proton decay.

* Papers that analyze "naturalness". See, e.g., here.

* Papers that propose non-sphaleron violations of baryon number or lepton number conservation (e.g. flavor changing neutral currents).

* Papers about quark stars and/or boson stars.

* Papers about macroscopic wormholes.

* Papers about magnetic monopoles.

* Papers about tachyons.

* Papers proposing more than five dimensions.

* Papers proposing tiny "rolled up" dimensions.

* Papers about Kaluza-Klein gravitons.

* Papers about Proca models.

* Papers about QCD Peccei-Quinn axions and/or the "strong CP problem". See, e.g., here.

* Papers proposing violations of the combined CPT symmetry.

* Papers proposing faster than light communication or information transfer.

* Papers about cosmological bounce models.

* Papers about "tired light" models.

* Papers that attempt to explain a discrepancy between experimental measurements of muon g-2 and the Standard Model value of it with new physics.

* Papers that take the new CDF W-Boson mass anomaly seriously. See, e.g., here.

* Papers that employ anthropic reasoning.

* Papers proposing theories where different generations of a particle have different properties (such as couplings) that are not coded in the particle's mass or its CKM/PMNS matrix couplings.

* Papers proposing fourth generation fundamental fermions. See, e.g., here.

I only blog a small percentage of the articles that I flag as interesting and bookmark (by subject area). Sometimes, they are too incremental or too technical or similar to papers on similar subjects that I've blogged before, and sometimes, I'm just not moved to write about them.