🗑️ Useless

“Not everything that is published deserves to be read — or done.”

Useless refers to any academic or clinical content that fails to offer applicable knowledge, actionable insight, or meaningful contribution to understanding, decision-making, or patient care.

In essence: it fills pages, not minds.

• 🪞 Theory without practice – Elaborate models or reviews with no real-world implications
• 🔁 Repetition of known facts – Adds nothing new to the field; rewords the obvious
• 💭 Abstract admiration – Describes a promising idea with no mechanism, data, or plan
• 🧻 Unreadable or inapplicable – So dense, vague, or narrow it becomes irrelevant even to specialists

A useless paper may:

• Conclude with “further studies are needed” without specifying what, why, or how
• Present a “review” that is neither critical nor focused
• Discuss hypothetical technologies not yet validated in any model
• Be published only to increase the author’s h-index, not the reader’s understanding

Examples include:

• Reviews on brain tumors that never mention surgical indications
• Articles on AI tools that were never tested on clinical datasets
• Protocols so idealized they collapse in real-world settings

• Wastes clinician time and journal space
• Pollutes literature with noise over signal
• Inflates CVs but not patient outcomes
• Contributes to academic theater, not evidence-based medicine

Ask:

• “Does this change anything I do, understand, or teach?”
• “Is there any result or framework I could actually use?”
• “Would anything be lost if this article had never been published?”

If the answer is no — it's useless.

• epistemological_fluff
• uncritical
• academic_theater