4 ms·

Doing science and publishing papers is extremely different than pottery, and that has nothing to do with a difference in status between the two. When doing any

Doing science and publishing papers is extremely different than pottery, and that has nothing to do with a difference in status between the two. When doing any form of art, the most important thing is to practice. If you make 20 vases, the 20th is most likely far better than the 1st. Same with painting, drawing, other forms of sculpture... nothing teaches like practice. There's such thing as more complicated pieces that require more work, but the majority of actual skill at pottery is practiced the same way whether you are aiming for a relatively complex piece, or one that is just hard enough it doesn't bore you. On the other hand, in science, there's no such thing as random practice making you better. The more papers you publish, the higher percentage of the time is dedicated to the writing bits, and getting through the approvals, and doing a million submissions, instead of coming up with good hypothesis, and finding something to do. Aiming at a hard problem is going to lead you to publishing less, not more, so the things you'll work on are going to be minor improvements, nothing difficult. Therefore, the chances that you'll discover anything major definitely decrease the more often you publish. So if in your intuition you'd be better off focusing on making a lot of unimportant papers... why would anyone aim for any fundamental problem, which has a higher chance of failure? You think the efforts to actually publish and submit, all away from the lab aren't mostly wasteful? Because it's really hard for me to imagine how publishing more doesn't mean far less time doing research.

ansgri 3y ago
Interesting analogy with pottery. I see that an important academic practice that does scale like vases is structuring your research in easily publishable way. As a beginner (typically a young highly motivated idealistic student — who else would want to go to academia in the first place?), you can start with good research idea and important results and no understanding of academic world, but struggle to get accepted anywhere decent because you didn't follow all unwritten rules, and as you get experience, you learn the rules of the game and plan your work to contain many low-risk "least publishable units" to build your reputation. So yes, "a lot of unimportant papers". Many interesting papers nowadays come from commercial R&D departments, like MS Research, because unimportant papers probably don't move your main KPIs (which would be "a lot of patents" AFAIU), and only interesting results improve the image of the company and serve as good marketing material.

ansgri 3y ago

Interesting analogy with pottery. I see that an important academic practice that does scale like vases is structuring your research in easily publishable way. As a beginner (typically a young highly motivated idealistic student — who else would want to go to academia in the first place?), you can start with good research idea and important results and no understanding of academic world, but struggle to get accepted anywhere decent because you didn't follow all unwritten rules, and as you get experience, you learn the rules of the game and plan your work to contain many low-risk "least publishable units" to build your reputation. So yes, "a lot of unimportant papers". Many interesting papers nowadays come from commercial R&D departments, like MS Research, because unimportant papers probably don't move your main KPIs (which would be "a lot of patents" AFAIU), and only interesting results improve the image of the company and serve as good marketing material.