Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should elaborate. In my experience academia is largely a status structure where people are groomed to be hirable at schools X, Y, Z and publish regularly in conferences/journals A, B, C. You're saying this is fertile ground for hardcore innovation? No way. The extreme majority of the work is incremental and predictable; small low-impact results. (Disclaimer: My experience is in CS.)
Alright, I'll elaborate. My dissertation was based on a highly speculative new treatment, in a field where mathematical models are not widely used. One of the potential answers was "Yes, this should entirely change the course of care for a particular disease." My current advisee's first paper is, essentially, "Has the field been doing this wrong this whole time?" Note that I publish regularly in the good society leve…
Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
#311That's cool, congrats. In my field, computer science, it's far from your experience. Over and over I've experienced PhD students being pushed away from more radical ideas (opening "risky" but potentially really promising new areas of inquiry) toward incremental work on what's currently "hot" in the field. Yes I concur that I used "incremental" in an unnecessarily disparaging way. Some incremental work can be revolutionary, but in my experience in my field, most of it is humdrum.