Publish or Perish Incentives

Original article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-...Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18523847

I'd highly recommend watching this documentary called Paywall [1] which explains the unhealthy dynamic between academia and publishing. TL;DR - academic prestige and career progression depends on being published in highly rated journals.[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM_nWsdbNvQ

A big problem are the perverse incentives researchers are facing. The only thing that matters is publishing in prestigious journals, otherwise your career is pretty much over (no real chance to get tenure). Universities often don't even check the publications, and researchers usually omit the actual title of the publication and only keep the name of the journal. Moreover, if you want to get tenure you need to work on "hot" topics (as in CRISPR at the moment or cancer in general),

The incentives are wrong in the first place. People are judged based on number of papers published to prestigious journals, and demoted when they don't have quarterly positive results, and given promotions and financial boosts accordingly. People attempting to reproduce past results for verification get little to no reward. This incentive structure is in direct contradiction to honesty and real science.

Maybe both have the same cause, the need to publish important(-looking) results, or perish? Being scientifically rigorous may take a back seat: unimpressive papers are hard or impossible to publish.Structurally it's similar to clickbait. I heard that such an incentive structure did bad things to journalism.

This is interesting. Not something that I ever came across but can very much believe this happens.Most problems in academia come down to bad incentives. Researchers are incentivised to publish for prestige and citations, which are poor proxies for improving our understanding of the world around us.

I think the main problem is that the incentives are wrong. Academics are mostly evaluated on the number of papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals and the number of citations they obtain. Therefore, the main incentive for academics is to sell papers and it doesn't matter whether the papers are true or not as long as other researchers and peer-reviewers like to read and cite it.

Just another result of the terrible Publish or Perish incentives in Academia.

It's not hacks. It's the stupid academic tenureship system and monetary incentives.Graduate students need to publish papers to advance in their careers. Postdoctoral students need to publish papers to be eligible for a tenure track position. And tenured faculty need to publish to obtain grants and keep their jobs. It's called publish or perish.Replicable research needs more time and money to conduct. But what researcher wants to publish once every few years?Since there is

In their defense, they did note "publish or perish" as a "system of perverse incentives", which presumably affects a far broader swath of science than the few politicized topics they mentioned.