3 ms·
Rigorous peer review, let alone paid (which causes its own issues beyond money), is totally infeasible with the current publication pressure. It's hard to find
by jampekka 3y ago
Rigorous peer review, let alone paid (which causes its own issues beyond money), is totally infeasible with the current publication pressure. It's hard to find reviewers even with the current lax criteria of both reviewers and quality of their review (the latter is more problematic).
The publication volume is just way way way too high. But researchers who don't publish multiple articles per year, regardless if you have anything of value to publish, perish. If you don't churn out paper-per-year in your PhD, you don't get the PhD.
Much of the manuscripts that get submitted to journals are incredibly bad. Most are just bad. But as both editor and reviewer, I usually let them be published out of pity if the stuff isn't blatantly wrong; the poor PhD student's whole career is on the line.
Journals being full of crap is not SO bad within science because everybody knows they are full of crap. But if an "outsider" thinks that being published in a peer-reviewed journal, even a "good" journal, means that the article isn't crap, it can be literally life-or-death (like in this case).
Academia is broken because it's being run as a business whose purpose is to churn out papers. Welcome to neoliberalism.
- cscheid 3y agoAlthough the above comment might sound negative and harsh, it is a perfect distillation of modern research-oriented academic environments. (I was a moderately-successful professor in these environments. I woke up one day and simply couldn't do it anymore.)
- stanford_labrat 3y agoPublication rate DURING your PhD is highly variable from field to field...I don't know what field you are in but generally speaking across my 3 fields students are required to have at least 1 from the entire PhD to graduate. Some even have none published by time of graduation. 1 per year is a ridiculous standard.
- jampekka 3y agoThis does vary across countries, and fields. In UK I was a bit surprised that you're not expected to publish at all before post-doc. In Finland usually at least 3 peer reviewed (first author) papers are required for a PhD in my field (cognitive science). In some fields (e.g. many engineering fields) even more. And PhD grants are typically for three to four years. It is ridiculous and the paper quality is what you'd expect.
- ska 3y agoIt is wildly different, true. In some areas, it is not uncommon to see PhD "thesis" that is essentially an intro stapled to 3-4 papers. It's also true that publication rates post PhD vary wildly as well, e.g. expectations for a tenure packet. However, it's also fair to say that expected publication rate has significantly grown universally. A generation or two ago, a solid career could be built on a handful of high impact papers. That's hard to imagine now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jampekka 3y agoThat thesis format is the norm in Finland in sciency fields and also in some arts. You can write a monograph (essentially a book) instead but that's frowned upon. Especially by admin because the papers bring the univerisity more money than monographs. Nowadays piles of inconsequential papers where you contributed little but your name is almost a requirement for a solid career. It's horrible.