From graduate students to full professors, scientists seem to be too entrenched in the current system to change it.
WHEN I WAS a graduate student and, later, a postdoctoral researcher, I would ask senior scientists what I could do to best position myself for a tenure-track faculty position. Their response, repeated almost verbatim to a person, was deceptively simple: Just keep writing papers.
The noble pursuit of science, where we strive together to articulate and refine theories to improve knowledge and practice has been mutated beyond recognition into something base and ugly where individuals and institutions compete to produce the most quantity rather than quality research outputs. This enterprise, which is akin to a competitive sausage factory is the driving force behind much that ails research practice. Such as the use of questionable publishers, paper mills and shonky practice. There is need for a serious change. Institutions, funding bodies, governments and learned societies must drive a change in practice that celebrates quality over quantity and values integrity over productivity.
Scientists and others have been calling out the shortcomings of this narrow-minded approach for more than a decade. They’ve noted how the insatiable need to feed the academic beast with ever more papers pushes scientists to sacrifice quality for quantity, leading to rushed, shoddy, and even fraudulent research. They’ve explained how this pressure has led to the rise of so-called “predatory journals,” which offer little-to-no barriers to publication for a price (although for many scientists outside of mainstream research centers, these journals can be one of the only ways to gain recognition). And critics have also pointed out how publish or perish results in the gaming of the publication system, with scientists seeking to gain as high a “score” as possible — as measured by publication metrics like h-indices — ignoring the principles of scientific integrity in the process.