5 ms·

I watched a lecture by an MIT database professor who recommends that the top 10 schools only allow up to 3 papers on CVs for junior faculty applications and 10

I watched a lecture by an MIT database professor who recommends that the top 10 schools only allow up to 3 papers on CVs for junior faculty applications and 10 for tenure applications. He thinks this will be enough to start a culture shift towards quality over quantity, which could go some way towards addressing the fraud and collusion ring issues by removing the incentive for these behaviors.

DistressedDrone 5y ago
If the universities wanted the problem fixed it would be fixed. I truly don't believe research universities are focused on producing value (other than to themselves).
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Apparently it wasn't always like this, and it used to be common for junior faculty hires to have only 0 or 1 publications coming out of their PhD program. Why did the culture deteriorate so much and become so myopically focused on weakly informative metrics like publication count?
  - magila 5y ago
    Because government grants demand it. Private patrons can trust their own judgment when deciding who to fund, but when it's taxpayer money being handed out people are understandably going to demand objective metrics to guard against corruption. In academia the objective metrics of choice are publication and citation count, so here we are.
    - christophilus 5y ago
      This is the answer, or a very large part of it. Incentives are set up such that this is an inevitable outcome.
  - _dps 5y ago
    Two likely contributors: 1) due to population effects, academic positions are much more competitive now than they were in say 1970; if you figure that the top 50 research universities are not generally expanding the number of professors, and that new professors generally also come from those top 50 research universities, then on average a top-50-research-university professor will generate one new such professor in a career, despite having 10-100x as many graduate students (this was different in the 70s when the university system was rapidly expanding). 2) the increasing desire for fairness in hiring and promotion (by itself, a good thing) means that you need to be able to resolve hiring and promotion disputes with something both objective and external to the university (in the same way some undergraduate institutions put more admissions weight on external and objective metrics like standardized tests compared to more easily game-able internal metrics like high school class grades)
  - atty 5y ago
    When fields are small, they can rely on much higher fidelity signals for hiring (having significant interactions with the individuals at conferences and workshops, for instance). I did my PhD in a sub field of nuclear physics, and even though I only published one paper in my PhD, I got a job offer at an Ivy League university because I had done extensive work with their group in collaboration, and the group leaders liked me. However, now that many research fields are so massive that it is impossible to personally know the majority of individuals, institutions need other ways of judging individuals. The number of papers published is a weak signal, but it’s better than nothing. Now that it’s being so heavily gamed by so many individuals, that signal strength is decreasing even more. There’s also a second strong corrupting factor that many, if not most, of these individuals do not want to become professors, they want to get a high paying job in industry, which means their short term output is far more important to them than their long term reputation in the field. I honestly don’t know what can be done to fix this that wouldn’t have negative side effects. But perhaps the side effects would be better than the situation we are in now.
szarnyasg 5y ago
Was it Mike Stonebraker's talk "My 10 Fears about the Future of the DBMS Field"? (2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture, presented at the University of Illinois): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Yeah that's it. Some other notable points from that talk: - He thinks it's not an overly difficult problem to solve. It just needs some grassroots push from a handful of people in each of the top CS departments. It's just that not many are really trying to push for it. (I assume there would be people staked in the current system, though, who want to maintain the status quo.) - Nowadays he sees people trying to split research up into Least Publishable Units in order to maximize the number of papers. - Coming up with Postgres would've been impossible in today's climate since the time it took would entail an insufficient number of papers to get hired or promoted. - He thinks part of the reason that the culture has deteriorated is that Western universities have adopted cultural norms of East Asian universities, for whatever reasons.

DistressedDrone 5y ago

If the universities wanted the problem fixed it would be fixed. I truly don't believe research universities are focused on producing value (other than to themselves).

fighterpilot 5y ago
Apparently it wasn't always like this, and it used to be common for junior faculty hires to have only 0 or 1 publications coming out of their PhD program. Why did the culture deteriorate so much and become so myopically focused on weakly informative metrics like publication count?
- magila 5y ago
  Because government grants demand it. Private patrons can trust their own judgment when deciding who to fund, but when it's taxpayer money being handed out people are understandably going to demand objective metrics to guard against corruption. In academia the objective metrics of choice are publication and citation count, so here we are.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    This is the answer, or a very large part of it. Incentives are set up such that this is an inevitable outcome.
- _dps 5y ago
  Two likely contributors: 1) due to population effects, academic positions are much more competitive now than they were in say 1970; if you figure that the top 50 research universities are not generally expanding the number of professors, and that new professors generally also come from those top 50 research universities, then on average a top-50-research-university professor will generate one new such professor in a career, despite having 10-100x as many graduate students (this was different in the 70s when the university system was rapidly expanding). 2) the increasing desire for fairness in hiring and promotion (by itself, a good thing) means that you need to be able to resolve hiring and promotion disputes with something both objective and external to the university (in the same way some undergraduate institutions put more admissions weight on external and objective metrics like standardized tests compared to more easily game-able internal metrics like high school class grades)
- atty 5y ago
  When fields are small, they can rely on much higher fidelity signals for hiring (having significant interactions with the individuals at conferences and workshops, for instance). I did my PhD in a sub field of nuclear physics, and even though I only published one paper in my PhD, I got a job offer at an Ivy League university because I had done extensive work with their group in collaboration, and the group leaders liked me. However, now that many research fields are so massive that it is impossible to personally know the majority of individuals, institutions need other ways of judging individuals. The number of papers published is a weak signal, but it’s better than nothing. Now that it’s being so heavily gamed by so many individuals, that signal strength is decreasing even more. There’s also a second strong corrupting factor that many, if not most, of these individuals do not want to become professors, they want to get a high paying job in industry, which means their short term output is far more important to them than their long term reputation in the field. I honestly don’t know what can be done to fix this that wouldn’t have negative side effects. But perhaps the side effects would be better than the situation we are in now.

szarnyasg 5y ago

Was it Mike Stonebraker's talk "My 10 Fears about the Future of the DBMS Field"? (2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture, presented at the University of Illinois): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA

fighterpilot 5y ago
Yeah that's it. Some other notable points from that talk: - He thinks it's not an overly difficult problem to solve. It just needs some grassroots push from a handful of people in each of the top CS departments. It's just that not many are really trying to push for it. (I assume there would be people staked in the current system, though, who want to maintain the status quo.) - Nowadays he sees people trying to split research up into Least Publishable Units in order to maximize the number of papers. - Coming up with Postgres would've been impossible in today's climate since the time it took would entail an insufficient number of papers to get hired or promoted. - He thinks part of the reason that the culture has deteriorated is that Western universities have adopted cultural norms of East Asian universities, for whatever reasons.