Publish or Perish
Interesting article in
Physics Today on the Publish or Perish mentality in academia and whether it is a good idea or not...
bq. Three recent events, taking place in rapid succession, incited me to write this Opinion. The first was an annual report from a major school of engineering whose dean proudly listed 52 papers that he wrote in the course of the previous year. Such an output is, on average, one idea conceived, executed, written, and published every week. That is an amazing feat for a busy administrator, or anybody else for that matter. The second was a physics professor who was introduced at a meeting as the author of 80 books. This man was not the superhumanly prolific Isaac Asimov, but a professor with a publication rate, over a 20-year career, of one technical book every three months. The straw that broke the camel's back, at least this Arabian one, was a book on flow control I was asked to review for a journal. The 200-page, camera-ready manuscript was clearly never seen by a copyeditor and was mostly a shoddy cut-and-paste job from the author's doctoral dissertation--and worse, from the publications of others. The book offered little of value, yet it was priced at 50 cents per page. The three events are a syndrome of what is ailing academic publishing today.
Very good point - I can see that at one time, this was a good guideline to pursue. The publication of papers indicated that the author was working. It has evolved into a race against fellow faculty members so one is now spending all their time generating papers and doing no work...
Posted by DaveH at March 22, 2004 10:16 AM