Basically the post title. My newsfeed has been recently full with articles on how social science is broken, peer review the way it’s supposed to, and publication is a game. It’s inspired me to think deeper about scientific expertise and knowledge production and questions like, what counts as good research? Does it matter what kinds of journals you publish in? Does this broader academia cultural mandate to “publish or perish” have implications for the quality of knowledge?
Comments
Good question for Dr. Claude.
Blah, publish as soon as your story is complete enough. Who cares what journal, it could take many years more to get a nature paper and delay disseminating information that can be useful to others. Frequency > Impact, it’s better for the world that way.
The pressure to publish leads academics to write large numbers of low-impact papers rather than focus on writing few papers with high impact — especially in the early stages of one’s career, when the number of publications has a large influence on the kinds of tenure-tracks jobs one can get and on getting tenure. Even in the later stages of academics’ careers, when that have the job security that comes with tenure, they often are so conditions to publish, publish, publish, that they continue to just pump out meaningless crap.
I am a practitioner who tries publishing once a year to do justice to me having an actual PhD. From what I saw, in my field, it leads to oversaturation of meaningless papers stretched to 8,000 words contributing absolutely nothing novel to the field or the industry. They’re using well established terminology and substituting with their own out of the blue skies concoctions. They’re plainly refusing to be in any meaningful conversation with previous authors or, God forbid, the practice. You read and summarize one, you may very well said you read and summarized 100 because they make the same point using the same examples, different terminology and attitude to match.