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I have always wondered if the threshold for 'number of papers published' to get a professorship is higher than the number of high quality papers that can reason
by mirawelner 2y ago
I have always wondered if the threshold for 'number of papers published' to get a professorship is higher than the number of high quality papers that can reasonably published in that amount of time. So, people cut corners and publish bad papers or commit outright fraud. Because they do that, this keeps the required number of publications unreasonably high.
- firefax 2y agoPeter Higgs would agree: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... >Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough. >The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964. >He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." >Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.
- pjc50 2y agoYes. The bureaucratic systems put into place to increase "quality" and "output" are incoherent, so they create even more incentives for fraud. It's paper Stakhanovism.