Declining Value of Papers in Academia

For me the contradiction is as follows: huge pressure to publish, papers are king, and yet no one reads them, because they are too busy publishing, and hence your papers are worthless. So there's just an endless stream of wasted effort, since no one is reading each others' papers. Hence the value of each paper is now almost zero, even if a huge amount of effort has gone into it. As you say, there is no feedback at all. I published what is, imo, a very important breakthrough in fundamental quantum systems with applications for all high-precision measurements. But, basically no one has read it, barely even my own PhD supervisor. Why? They don't have time, in fact they're incentivised *not to*! Now I'm a postdoc and it's very lonely, I barely did any work for 2 years because I had zero support since everyone in my research group cares only about their own work. Even within the research group there is zero feedback.

I was working on a problem for around 6 months, had read a few thousand pages of advanced physics and mathematics, searched far and wide for research literature out there to help me find a solution, spent a few sleepless nights trying to work out solutions to this problem, came up with a fairly sophisticated model (system of nonlinear PDEs, solved using perturbation theory), etc… Long story short, I actually found the answer in two papers published in the 1960s (from NASA and another from a university in Germany) together which solved my problem. These two papers together had less than 4 citations (in 60+ years!). So I will say, don’t lose motivation. The work researchers do is very important, even if only realized by one person in the very far future. Stick with it folks, the system is a bit broken probably so I agree with much from what you have said in the video. 😅

Why do i have a feeling that every single person in our society is totally exhausted

Great video. This video has garnered 240k views, which is more than the total citations an academic could receive even if they published 200 papers, each cited 1,000 times. Tremendous impact, high value.

the decline in value of academic papers means a rise in the value of youtube comments. you can read all about it in this youtube comment

That's why single authored articles should carry much weight in promotions. Some professors are gaming the system with co-authors.

I said "no" to academia after a revealing experience at the very beginning. Without giving away identifiable information, here's what happened: - I worked for a few years on a new method of extracting data from physics experiments. - The results were excellent and allowed extraction of new results from old and new data sets. - I got a PhD on the results and submitted a paper. - The paper kept getting sent back from the review committee, but with strange comments, the things you would say if you didn't understand the material. Neither me nor my advisor understood why they would say what they said if they understood the material. Eventually I learned something that solved the mystery: Some of the people on the review committee were actively working on a competing approach to the one I developed and presented in the paper. So, there was an obvious conflict of interest between the paper and the committee, which made the mysterious negative comments suddenly make sense.

When you learnt your job at 5-star restaurant, and realize you ended up in a fast food restaurant instead

In my line of research, I found more than 90% of published papers to be either nonesense, repeating the known in a different way, or even outright academic fraud in some cases. You often find "paper gangs"... A group of people who cite each others papers repeatedly and even review each other in lower quality publications with no "associations" checks! There is very little value in most of the published papers I encounter. This makes doing research a very difficult endeavour for me. I think the main reason for this is "publish or perish" situation in academia.

My sister is a science loving phd micro biologist. Her thesis is a wonderfull small improvement in the understanding of AIDS, something that most likely will have very positive future applications. The shit she goes through on a daily basis is horrifying. Everyone tells her to go private, but she still believes she can have an impact in public research..... she works endless hours, for a mediocre salary (a criminal one hourly) for game of thrones schemer bosses. It is so infuriating.

A trick my supervisor gave me to get extra citations is to attend a lot of conferences. 6 per year, but not to publish conference papers, rather to give presentations, citing or using your own work, because when 500 scholars from your field are watching your research, and also find it interesting, they'll take a note, and likely cite it in the future.

The problem stems from University admin culture: it wants facile criteria to judge something which is beyond them to understand. So they take refuge in cheap numerical data, which has no connection to the actual reality. Compare it to art, for the sake of making a point: suppose the value of a composer (say Bach, Mozart, Beethoven) was judged by a numerical value (eg. the number of downloads of their music clips) : it would be a good 'objective'measure to use for the tone-deaf. But would it capture the true value of the output of those composers?

I also left academia after being thoroughly disappointed with the system. As a Ph.D. I realized that no one actually reads papers/theses because they're so hard to understand. So I wrote my Ph.D. thesis as a textbook: starting from master-course level, building up with examples, exercises, background appendices, and so on, up to the level of my own published papers. My students loved it. My thesis committee didn't: it was rejected. I had to write my thesis as paper-style: condensed and incomprehensible to anyone but a veteran in the field. What followed was a year of evening-time rewriting (without getting paid) merging all my papers into a very dense thesis. This was in the end accepted and I got my Ph.D. degree. Now, six years later, I still get regular emails from random people thanking me for my free introductory textbook thesis. It helped them a ton to get familiar with the field. I never got a single email about any of my papers or my rewritten Ph.D. thesis. Conclusion: no one needs papers. (Sure, with a very few exceptions.) We generally need clear and high-quality educational materials. But the system only forces us to write papers and rejects anything else. The system is broken. The above video also shows really well how the system is broken. Sadly the solutions provided are "How to survive and thrive within this broken system" and not "How to actually fix this system, so science can start making an impact and improving the world again."

I did my PhD 20+ years ago. I didn't like this game of publishing, so never sought a career in academia. I just curiously opened my Google scholar profile, I got total 2650 citations and still have a steady 100/per year citations. Considering I haven't published anything in last 20 years, so it is not too bad 😀

I never lost so much faith in research papers as I did when I first started interacting with people in academia during my PhD studies. Not only are papers pushed out and seemingly rushed because more is better, but the quality is demoralizing as well. The amount of times I've heard senior advisors make assumptions, I ask them why they can make that assumption, they say "it HAS to be that way" or "why wouldn't that be right" as if the burden of proof was on me when they made the claim. I would then go on to show demonstrably why these assumptions were bad and they just act like it never happened. Like what if I wasn't there to force them to prove their assumptions? We'd just be assuming our way to the next paper?? I hate it.

A very brave video containing a lot of truth. Few people dare to say this, although many true researchers feel and think it. Publishing a scientific product has become a business model. I visited the ATLAS Experiment at CERN and made the following observations: 1. One of the top authors has published 1,816 papers. If one's professional career lasts 40 years, the calculation says: 40 years X 365 days = 14600 days; 14600 / 1816 = 8 days to publish a paper That means 1 paper is published every 8 days during the entire professional life! That's about 45 papers a year... every year! 2. The same author has an h-index of 167. "The h-index is defined as the maximum value of h such that the given author/journal has published at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times." The top author has 167 papers each one cited 167 times! 3. A paper published by researchers had 78 authors! I realize that CERN is something "big" and quite complex. But... there are 78 authors anyway... Probably all those people are high-level scientists. But... what makes them hyperprolific? Is it real? How is it possible? Is it more for the benefit of science or is it a kind of business?

Coming from industry, I learnt these rules in Academia: 1. Publish or perish. 2. Novelty is not enough. Novelty should be valuable. 3. Never reveal your code, until you are done with 2-3 variant papers on the same or similar topic. 4. No one cares on the quality of code. 5. Keep writing. Writing is thinking. 6. Be more resourceful than more honest.

I don’t think many people realise what the job of an academic is these days. Your job is to get funding to your university. It’s not research, it’s not even papers, it is all about getting money to the university and to that end. You need to optimise for this. Having good friends gives you better resources to get more money to your institute. Better paper metrics give you better chances at getting funding. It is ALL about getting money to your university. If you want to be a successful researcher, you need to optimise to that goal.

"good luck with your papers" - I grinned as I turned back to my overleaf tab

The whole academic system is basically rotten in its core. As a young researcher its extremely hard to actually make it because nothing works in your favor. Just to name a few: 1. You are extremely dependent on senior researchers / professors, because they are the gatekeepers. Many of them see you as their workhorse who will publish with minimum effort from their side (if you are a postdoc). To top it off, many of them even insist on being put as the lead scientist on any paper you publish (even if their contribution was miniscule). And sometimes they even delegate a lot of extra work (teaching or administration) to you. It is very difficult to argue against this because they hold so much power and potentially can end your career before it even started ... 2. With the increased pressure to publish many papers, it's not just the quality of the papers but also the metrics themselves which get scewed. Lots of papers means lots of citations of older work, which again works in favor for more senior scientists. The side effect is that their metrics will ramp up significantly whilst junior scientists bite the dust. This is especially true if you are not working with a high profile professor. 3. The whole "open science" concept as it is introduced these days makes it even worse for young group leaders or whole institutions, which don't have as many financial ressources to fund open access publications (which cost thousands of dollars). Again OA leads to more citations, and statistically established researchers with a big name have the most ressources to make their work accessible. There are of course also many good sides to an academic career and there are good professors and senior scientists who really want to make a change, however it is best to be realistic and don't have any illusions about it.