Re:Publish and Perish
by ProjectArcturis on Sunday June 06, 2021 @12:31PM
(#27414225)
But the question is, can you make grants more dependent on actual scientific breakthroughs rather than publication spam?
Right. Listing 10 papers with “ok” impact should be viewed as 10 “bad” papers and not 10 “good” papers.
It’s extremely unlikely that a 50 page CV is demonstrating real value throughout. It’s the academic equivalent of putting 20 Javascript frameworks on your Resume because you used them one time.
The publication hyper-competitiveness is a direct result of grant hyper-competitiveness. Funding rates at top US agencies are around 10-20%. Grants are how researchers fund their research, pay their students, pay themselves, and earn tenure, so there's a lot riding on getting them.
I see a lot of talk about the problems with publications on HN and possible fixes to the publication process (like requiring code for example, or as you suggest changing the important metrics), but publications really are just a proxy (and prerequisite) for the grant application process. You can change around the publication process all you want, but nothing will improve unless you address the issue of grants, because that's where the money is.