5 ms·

Why do people need to publish? The whole point of publishing was content discovery. Now that you can just push it to a preprint or to your blog what’s the point

by baby 5y ago

Why do people need to publish? The whole point of publishing was content discovery. Now that you can just push it to a preprint or to your blog what’s the point? I’ve written papers that weren’t published but still got cited.

Spooky23 5y ago
Metrics. You can’t manage what you can’t measure!
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - Marilyn Strathern
ISL 5y ago
When you are looking for a job, are up for promotion/tenure, or applying for grants, a long publication record in prestigious journals is helpful.
PeterisP 5y ago
I need money to do research, available grants require achieving specific measurable results during the grant (mostly publications fitting specific criteria e.g. "journal that's rated above 50% of average citation rating in your subfield" or "peer reviewed publication that's indexed in SCOPUS or WebOfScience", definitely not a preprint or blog), and getting one is also conditional on earlier publications like that. In essence, the evaluators (non-scientific organizations who fund scientific organizations) need some metric to compare and distinguish decent research from weak, one that's (a) comparable across fields of science; (b) verifiable by people outside that field (so you can compare across subfields); (c) not trivially changeable by the funded institutions themselves; (d) describable in an objective manner so that you can write up the exact criteria/metrics in a legal act or contract. There are NO reasonable metrics that fit these criteria; international peer-reviewed-publications fitting certain criteria are bad but perhaps least bad from the (even worse) alternatives like direct evaluation by government committees.
- dash2 5y ago
  Simple cetacean count of the paper itself is probably a better metric than journal, though it’s certainly not perfect either. (I am leaving cetacean cunt in because it’s a funny autocorrect.) (And now I’m leaving the above in, because it’s even funnier. Both genuine.)
mbg721 5y ago
At some point, there's not going to be enough budget for both the football coach and the Latin philology professor. We should hire another three layers of housing diversity deans just to be safe.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by baby 5y ago

Spooky23 5y ago

Metrics. You can’t manage what you can’t measure!

ajmurmann 5y ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - Marilyn Strathern

ISL 5y ago

When you are looking for a job, are up for promotion/tenure, or applying for grants, a long publication record in prestigious journals is helpful.

PeterisP 5y ago

I need money to do research, available grants require achieving specific measurable results during the grant (mostly publications fitting specific criteria e.g. "journal that's rated above 50% of average citation rating in your subfield" or "peer reviewed publication that's indexed in SCOPUS or WebOfScience", definitely not a preprint or blog), and getting one is also conditional on earlier publications like that. In essence, the evaluators (non-scientific organizations who fund scientific organizations) need some metric to compare and distinguish decent research from weak, one that's (a) comparable across fields of science; (b) verifiable by people outside that field (so you can compare across subfields); (c) not trivially changeable by the funded institutions themselves; (d) describable in an objective manner so that you can write up the exact criteria/metrics in a legal act or contract. There are NO reasonable metrics that fit these criteria; international peer-reviewed-publications fitting certain criteria are bad but perhaps least bad from the (even worse) alternatives like direct evaluation by government committees.

dash2 5y ago
Simple cetacean count of the paper itself is probably a better metric than journal, though it’s certainly not perfect either. (I am leaving cetacean cunt in because it’s a funny autocorrect.) (And now I’m leaving the above in, because it’s even funnier. Both genuine.)

mbg721 5y ago

At some point, there's not going to be enough budget for both the football coach and the Latin philology professor. We should hire another three layers of housing diversity deans just to be safe.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]