Some people want to pursue a research career because they hope to make exciting and valuable discoveries. Unfortunately, being a professor is is not about making discoveries. Academia is all about publishing!
So what's the difference between research many aspiring PhD students hope for and publishing? I think the reality is that a scholar may only have 1-2 useful ideas/discoveries in his or her life time. In fact, many people are not that lucky.
Despite the fact that most researchers do not really have anything new to offer, they have to publish regularly. Because of that, they often publish things that are not even worth reading. I'd say that in many fields about 95% of top publications are not even worth reading, since they don't offer much beyond common sense or what has been said in the past.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You're absolutely right. We all begin our PhDs with this romantic vision in our minds that we're going to 'break the field' with an idea that will shake the very foundations of our disciplines. The harsh reality sinks in when we find out that we have to churn out publications in order to boost the research profile of our department. The departments receive funding based on the number of publications its members produce. Publish or die basically.
ReplyDeleteI gonna write a post some day that draws an analogy between publications-based reward system and planned economy in USSR. In USSR, companies were often rewarded based on numbers (e.g. number of shoes a factory produces annually). In the absence of free market, factory managers had no clue whether someone is actually interested in buying those shoes. And they didn't care, because they were rewarded based on output numbers.
ReplyDeleteIn the UK, the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) is annihilating academia as we knew it. Basically, departments which have high ratings have to ceaselessly work to keep their status by pumping out publications conveyor belt fashion. The funding is all dependent upon the number of publications and research students registered. Many academics are actually jumping ship because they can't cope with these newly-emergent demands. It's getting worse by the minute. Academics are now being encouraged to do 'collaborative research', and the 'lone scholar' model is disappearing. Everything's changing so fast.
ReplyDeleteIt Publish or Perish. You better be publishing crap then.
ReplyDeleteAnother strange thing I noticed recently in my PhD program: Some people submit the same results to 3-4 different conferences. I go to a top 10 school in Engineering and work with a big shot professor. I never imagined such an acclaimed professor would let such sub-sub-standard work to be even submitted to a conference. But, not just it was submitted, it was re-re-accepted in 3 different conferences, each one organized by a different professional society.
ReplyDeleteI feel the tissue paper in our toilets are more useful than such "research findings"
XD I'm toooootally agree with you...
ReplyDeleteI am a second year phd student in social science (I am ashamed to say it's even some sort of "science"), and I am really sad that I can totally agree with what you guys have said.
ReplyDelete