31–40 of 157 posts
Other suggestions how to address the problem are welcome.
As an academic (CS), I'm able to write one or two decent papers a year, in a very good year, three. Looking at colleagues who write ten a year I already get existential angst, and have to actively tell myself that life is not a competition and some things are more important. Writing fifty (while also teaching, writing grants, mentoring students, etc.) seems mind-numbing, even just in terms of the relatively routine t…
[flagged]
It’s time to do something about that. Isn’t it time to have two categories of authorship on (scientific) papers - authors and enablers? The latter is for people who organized, supervised and otherwise enabled the work etc. Other suggestions how to address the problem are welcome.
More seriously, the solution is not to use content-oblivious measures (e.g. number of papers/citations) when evaluating researchers.
In Mathematics, there is Paul Erdős* - who published >1,500 papers, with 500+ co-authors, in a ~65-year professional career. Though he is recognized as being very, very unusual. And Mathematics has the huge advantage of not needing the labs, equipment, experiments, etc. that restrict pretty much any "science" to a far slower pace. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Erd%C5%91s_num...
that's another thing, some people become so famous that having a paper with them is a big mark of prestige (erdos number), and people start to try to add them to papers they only marginally looked in the general direction of at best
As an academic (CS), I'm able to write one or two decent papers a year, in a very good year, three. Looking at colleagues who write ten a year I already get existential angst, and have to actively tell myself that life is not a competition and some things are more important. Writing fifty (while also teaching, writing grants, mentoring students, etc.) seems mind-numbing, even just in terms of the relatively routine t…
https://www.idug.org/browse/blogs/blogviewer?blogkey=a7b6fe8...
And he more or less says the focus on quantity has made the academic field (databases) irrelevant, because individual papers don't tell you anything useful. (Disclaimer: My interpretation of his talk, and I don't work in that field.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in a similar group a decade ago. At the time, I found it impressive and efficient, but looking back now, I find much of those papers not to amount to much. I wonder what your experience is: were those 30 papers per year good science overall?
Not OP but a thing to consider: the training the junior members gain from the process is valuable too. Those 30 papers may not amount to much, but if even one of the primary authors ends up with Nobel-caliber work once in their career, was that worth it?
I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and organizing the research as well as challenging the results and strengthening the presentation of th…
I was in a similar group a decade ago. At the time, I found it impressive and efficient, but looking back now, I find much of those papers not to amount to much. I wonder what your experience is: were those 30 papers per year good science overall?
And as the sibling pointed out, all of us students had great opportunities to write and submit papers and conferences. I had peers in grad school with very conservative supervisors that didn't want to publish very much (I can think of one prof in particular who was undoubtedly a very good researcher and infrequenty published very good papers). This can be a disservice to students who don't get the same experience, and it's an argument for why publication count is a good metric (even though it's obviously flawed)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP but a thing to consider: the training the junior members gain from the process is valuable too. Those 30 papers may not amount to much, but if even one of the primary authors ends up with Nobel-caliber work once in their career, was that worth it?
Are those junior members learning to do Nobel-caliber work or are they learning to pad their CVs by publishing tons of low-impact papers?