Maybe that’s part of the problem.
I remember hearing years ago about a few universities that had a policy for considering someone for promotion/tenure. The candidate would give the committee their 5 best papers and the committee would evaluate their research quality based on those.
Quality over quantity.
I wished that was the general rule as would solve so many problems. OTOH, nowadays multi-author papers have gone crazy. Some have over a hundred authors. Getting your own contributions to stand out in that world is a big problem.
In any case, for too many research institutions the real measure is how much money your bring in.
“Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?”
Reminds me of Peter’s Theory of Entrepreneurial Aggressiveness in Higher Education, stated as: “Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.”
Do you expect most papers to be significant? To follow the right path? A lot of papers are published in areas under investigation. There are multiple paths to follow to a solution, and most of them are going to be dead ends. But we don’t know which are dead ends until we explore them, do we?
Papers that seldom get referenced or used are nothing new. Over 50 years ago I knew someone at MIT who was doing a PhD in Physics based on some previous published work which he eventually found to be flawed. Took him an extra year to work around it. It wasn’t fraud, just a mistake.
Exactly this. My daughter is a professor and she knows journal quality by heart. I know it in my field also, but it is relatively small so we don’t have an issue.
I have a column in a journal, and used to do book reviews for them, and I often got offers to write a book on a subject I had mentioned in a satirical article. (My column consists of riffing on papers in that issue.)
I deleted the mail so I don’t know if they wanted money or not. I used to get a lot more offers from pay to publish places. That was decades ago.
I just started the first of two and it explains the issue well. Looking forward to listening to the rest. Thanks!
When I was taking chemistry at a community college in the late 1980s, a classmate asked our instructor why, with his credentials, he didn’t teach at a university. He replied that he could probably double or even triple his salary by doing so, but he would have had to do research and publish, and he didn’t want to do that; he only wanted to teach.
Makes sense to me.