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.
Good point! I did not mention it in the video: academics are very busy and do not read many papers. Some of them are just tired of reading about similar trendy ideas and minor improvements in their field. So we have millions of students publishing papers, but who actually reads them? According to my statistics, my papers are usually cited by other PhD students and sometimes postdocs.
@@chuscience The truth is that very few people are going to read your paper unless it is relevant to their own career. Therefore, we are effectively punished for doing pioneer work, since it requires a huge effort to advertise it and convince people they should learn it. I miss the days when it was actually excusible to just spend time simply learning without feeling bad about it
Just like any business with it's KPI's..... This is not science, it's a business, the educational business. Im most parts of the world it doesn't even pay well... I would have loved to be a researcher, but all of these things made me not want to do it.
I like searching ArXiv to see if there are any papers that have already explored solutions to some random math problem I came up with. As long as the submitted papers have correct math, more is better for that specific use case.
That will become problematic too. They will find ways to have more single-authored papers. How? There are ways. For examples, keep recycling old ideas and old papers; and dig up those old abandoned ideas and papers (even as a mid-career researcher, I have a huge number of these, maybe as many as my published first-authored papers). Nothing will get discarded now. Also, you can cut up the results to create more papers. Maybe you used to write one or two papers for an idea before. Now, you cut up your research into more smallest publishable units. Having too many single-authored may also be a sign that the authors have difficult personality in the work environment, dislike team work, do not collaborate, etc. What is rare will be considered valuable. Then in the future, someone in a YT comment will write that's why we need to put more weight to coauthored papers.
@@sunway1374 Single author papers are BAD. Everything NEEDS to be peer reviewed, which means you NEED co authors. Saying otherwise is ignororant. No you are not Einstein. If you don't like team work, get out of college, and go teach it and read the textbook yourself. If you don't like it, STOP COMPLAINING AND GROW UP. Something this generation needs to DO.
@@grdfhrghrggrtwqqu Did you reply to the wrong person? Read my comment again. I didn't say single-authored papers are good. In fact, quite the opposite could be what I have meant, although even then I didn't say papers with multiple authors are good. Also, you don't know me, why do you think I am in a college and of "this generation"? I don't know you... But from your comment, I guess you are not very experienced in the journal paper publication process.
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.
no, that doesn't make your negative comments suddenly make sense. If they were actively developing a competing approach, then they would have the knowledge to understand the material. It seems far more likely that the negative comments were left there to gaslight you into wasting your time while they developed a superior approach or at least a copy cat of your own approach. By the way, that isn't 100% at all. So I plainly disagree that the intent behind their comments got cleared up, UNLESS you're assuming they have bad intentions from the get-go. But that is a very specific line of thinking and you are missing several other potential motivators leading to the same outcome you experienced.. But anyway, I get you. You should paste your paper onto the net somehow though, so they can't claim they came up with your idea before you published.
@@snared_No, that doesn't necessarily mean that they were developing a superior method or copying his techniques. At the end of the day you and OP are just speculating. Whatever their intentions were it most likely wasn't good.
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. 😅
Your perseverance here should be rewarded, but sadly the audience may be so limited that it won't be. In the 60s those researchers probably felt less publishing pressure than now. I wouldn't know if competition and prestige has changed since then also.
wait, so the work is important because in the future someone will realize it is already done? what a ponzi scheme Edit: it is a ponzi scheme because its existance is only justified by its existance. Didnt think I had to clarify this. Please dont answer it is not, im reducing to absurd. Not a big reduction though, as of today
@@gsuekbdhsidbdhd even more strict of a ponzi scheme then. I'm sure they make some progress, it's hard to believe it is worth the money and other resources. It's not like Open AI and not university of Toronto is king of Rohan
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 problem is aggravated by the fact that it is often difficult for editors to find qualified academics who are willing to act as peer reviewers. They aren't paid and often remain anonymous afterwards so that they get neither remuneration nor credit for their work. No wonder many academics are unwilling to take on this unpaid work when they already have so much else to do. It is not easy to see a solution to this. Paying peer reviewers would obviously create all sorts of new problems.
@@grzegorzach3891 well as the original comment stated: " Paying peer reviewers would obviously create all sorts of new problems". I just don't see how paying would improve the quality (!) of peer review. It might be easier to find reviewers, yes. But are there really so many people right now who think: "Man if i would get paid a little, i would actually take this review more serious and make sure its a real quality review." Peer reviewing lives from scientists who have a strong idealism of wanting to maintain quality in literature, no money is gonna change that.
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."
You have to realize the purpose of scientific research is to advance understanding, right? Scientific papers being hard to understand is a good thing, because it means the research being discussed is breakthrough or at least innovative. Also, since a scientific paper is supposed to be novel, you don't really want to be teaching it to people until it is well proven and/or tested, even if it's published; I've found many cited papers that turned out to be incorrect after new research comes out. Educational material is already out there but it's too expensive, it should be free.
You're saying it's a good thing papers are hard to understand? Are you serious? Please tell that to the thousands of PhD students who are trying to get introduced into a field by reading papers, and struggle massively with it, because the way they're written does not promote understanding in any way. It's pointless, dehumanizing, and causes a ton of mental damage. I couldn't disagree more.
@@Avento8 Seriously? Mental damage? Then perhaps you're truly not meant for this field... We don't need researchers who struggle with understanding anything. We need people who have the capability of furthering human understanding, not these people who make worthless recycled papers. We had a fair share of those at my university, those people who barely understood the field they were in, and got by publishing compilation papers that did nothing.
You can condescend and insult all you want, but mental health issues among PhDs are significantly higher than in the general population. So is the suicide rate. Denying it won't make it less so.
Your argument is of the form, "This is how it's always been, so that's how it's supposed to be." While mine is of the form "This is what people really need and what would be helpful, so that's what we should do." Which is stronger? ;-)
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.
Yeah and this is bad. Why would you justify this? Academia is supposed to have a higher goal than personal profit. I think we're in sorry times where colleges are just another greedy business. I think it's sad as fuk, why don't you? All this money that comes in, and then where does it go? Don't we see a problem with this? Tuition is rising steeply, more and more students are being priced out and unable to meet the shortfalls with other forms of assistance, all while the PhDs are being dutiful little slaves trying to bring in the money, and plenty of other sources of money are rolling in and yet.......what? Are all the universes employees then paid comfortably and fairly and his tuition kept reasonable? Not in most places. So the university is nothing but a profit seeking machine then? Just another business? Well isn't that just so enlightened. I have a lot of problems with this. Apparently you don't. Again I ask you, where the hell does all this money go??? Are you aware that according to more and more reports that have surfaced the majority of staff and support staff at universities are poorly paid??? Apparently postdocs have a shameful record of job security because they're given appallingly short work contracts from their superiors, from 2 mos to 3 years tops. I should think this would be unacceptable. Most people want some security in their job, it doesn't have to be set in stone, but it is completely unfair to any worker especially a professional credentialed staff worker to provide them next to no predictability and longer-term contract so they can plan their life accordingly. I mean this shit sounds exploitative af don't you see it??? About the money - so basically the University president is your pimp and you're supposed to be their loyal bitch and if you're not bringing in enough money your career is going to go down the toilet- yeah? A crass but apt analogy yes??? Also are you aware that the presence of medium and large and universities has a disastrous knock-on effect of local rent prices? now local city councils are to blame for this because they refuse to enact rent control because they're corrupt trolls, but yes, universities do this whether they intend to or not. Also, are you aware that many colleges and universities pay zero taxes and contribute very little to their surrounding economy? I wonder if you're aware of any of this. I know we've all been trained to view the university as this august refined altruistic institution that is nothing but beatific and a positive in every way but unfortunately, whether they intend to or not, they bring a lot of negative with them. Looks like there's a lot of crookedness that goes on at the top level of university management. Because right now I don't see anything that they're doing as ethical. Not sure if greater regulation (specific laws) would change this. Still looking into that.
Yes, that's what I observed and concluded too. People still talk about publish or perish, like having papers is sufficient. No, no, no. You need to have grants. The more the better, the larger the better. And that is sufficient. It's been "Grants or perish" for at least 2 decades now.
And yet you're paid shit for this. Or at least not very well apparently. Lol. Ok well I think it's awesome that universities have become nothing but small corporations today.
@@sunway1374 This is true. However without the papers you don't get the grants Now it may be that someone has superior journal output and doesn't get the grant vs. someone who only has average journal output who doesnt This can also come down to how well the grant was written and novelty, etc.
@@praphael OK. But papers are much easier to get than grants. And you don't need great papers to get a grant. I know people who have many papers but never get a tenure (inc. me), and others who have many papers and even written books but never rise above associate prof. All because we have never been PI of a large enough grant.
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.
Academia is a giant scam with an insane noise to signal ratio. 80-90% of papers can't even be replicated. The reality is that a tiny amount of paper are great and have huge impact. It's a winner takes all field. Like all information fields where the best/most popular can capture the entire market. Academia is just another Hollywood.
I wrote a paper for school just to get some experience and while i was researching found out the main papers i was citing were from a field with that kind of peer reviewing done mostly to make money. It was kind of sickening bc it was supposed to be research on how to improve ppls mental health and instead was just a waste of the public’s money and created a lot of misconceptions in the field that ppl still believe today
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?
Exactly. Mozart wrote 41 symphonies but for the most part the first 30 or so are ignored compared to the study of his later ones like no. 39 or no. 41. Same for Haydn, he wrote 100+ but many haven't even heard any of the first 90. Meanwhile Beethoven wrote 9, all of which are highly revered. Many music scholars don't fall into the "your papers are your career" category, anyway, considering the additional achievements of performances, clinics, and masterclasses. Though publications of course are part of it
What would be the alternative solution ? You think a university has the time, the energy or the ability to read the work of every single one of their workforce ? Going from Mayan history to particule physics through the biology of the shrimp or the sociology of birthday parties ? And even then, measuring the quality of a paper is quite subjective. Of course they need easy, understandable metrics to make a choice. No matter how flawed their are.
@@alioshax7797the alternative is probably not capitalism, at least not the runaway form of it we see around us today. As long as everyone is beholden to the almighty dollar, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake will forever be a secondary consideration. Even many of the great composers had to spend time writing and playing for their patrons to make ends meet. Some died penniless, and some were barely recognized and appreciated in their own time. Only through the focused lens of history do we truly understand their lasting contributions to the field. The same can be said for countless novelists, painters, and inventors throughout history.
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.
@@GuyMichaelyit gives you competitive advantage when developing the new methods/new experiments. Don't want to release code and then get scooped on some idea extension. Sort of trading off impact for paper quantity
I agree with 1, 2, and 3. I am a programmer, so no on 4. 5 is good only with endless editing and revision. I do not agree with the willingness to sacrifice honesty.
What an abomination of a system we have made. Research is made only in the name of making enough money to barely scrape by and if you get any inkling of an idea sprouting from research you need to hide it to yourself so you can hopefully continue to have medical insurance and maybe money left over for a bag of rice
@@marsaeolus9248 no you're just terminally and chronically online so you just choose to exist in this sphere of negativity. Get off twitter, politics and touch some grass
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 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?
I think somebody* has a "Law" to the effect that once any particular measure is selected as an index of quality and used to give rewards, people in that field work to maximise that one measure, and it stops being a useful index. That's where "Number of publications to your name" falls down, because of the formation of publishing cartels. Three people in one lab chop up every experiment or study into three, and spread the data and analysis over three papers under their names in a different order, plus of course the head of department and a few people. So to make sense of it you have to read all three papers. The big boss has his name on all of them, and gets a bigger citation number: but that's OK, because editors see his name and accept the paper, though he may not even have read it. This system works to the benefit of the "big bosses" who run laboratories or research groups, so they are not going to change it. What does it measure in reality? The ability to organise a group of researchers and crack the whip to keep them both working and publishing. That's what the University Grants Committee wants, and what the university's own own hierarchy is monitoring. No one person can evaluate the worth of an Assyriologist, a Molecular Biologist and a Health Economist, but the committee members can all look at the numbers and compare them with those of similar academic rank elsewhere. * Goodhart's Law.
This is a known feature, not a bug. Because the experiments in high-energy research are massive, everyone who works on some aspect of them in the collaboration is listed on every paper that comes out. Also these experiments are expensive, so every country that contributes wants their researchers to be listed.
Every time CERN thinks they've found something, their thousands of scientists rush out papers on the subject. They we get a "never mind". Wake me when you all actually have found something interesting. (Yawn...)
classist statements like that are why it is so bad. the only cure is full freedom of all information. transparency is the only way. classism, assuming the fast food eater must be an uneducated hoard, and that the academia goer isnt some nepotism yacht club scholarship is the exact reason why this happens. theres good people who are privleged and theres good people who are not. when someone denies the "fast food eaters" an education, equal access, they've created classist slavery. when they put the privlege folk into a position theyre born into, they are also robbed of their potential expertise. we're all equal and creating a system of illusions to say otherwise creates lies about cancer.
Let me fix that statement "When you learnt your job at 5-star restaurant, and realize you ended up in a fast food restaurant instead cause your not a 5-star restaurant chef"
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.
Well, partially, this is true. However 1. Travelling, preparing and giving talks takes time from research 2. To be invited to a conference you need resources. If your supervisor has resources to give you many opportunities to speak is one thing. Otherwise, it is hard to be invited to speak anywhere. 3. Conferences are no longer as they are supposed to be. Nobody listens, everyone is typing their own papers during talks. Or sleeping, or watching football. Actually, as I got permanent job in academia I almost stopped going to conferences. I don't quite see the point except tourism. I almost never get any valuable feedback. Concerning the other talks, usually, people are just recycling the old stuff. There is nothing interesting and speakers behave as sales managers. In case there is anything interesting I'd rather read a paper my self, not wasting time one useless sales interprises.
So true. After 50 successful years at the top of academia, I now nouce that 80% of papers submitted for publication are simply rehash of old research by yourself and others, which peer reviewers are so unfamilar with the history of the discipline (due to the avalanche of largely irrelevant papers,) they frequently don't even notice.
Congratulations on the video. I stumbled on it from the YT algo. What you are saying is totally true. I just quit my postdoc for a job in the industry and you cannot imagine how the past months have been so relaxing not having to worry anymore about publishing new papers every second of my free time. I never worked on weekends nor evenings but I was always thinking in my free times about coming up with the next great paper and how to milk more the same models. This is coming from someone that had more than 2x the average paper output during the PhD in my department and have just published my last paper in Nature. I am so glad that I no longer need to worry about checking my citation count on ADS when I turn on the computer in the morning...
Congrats on getting a normal job! I am currently the last postdoc remaining in my team. The other 4 postdocs I knew have already left for industry, and feel happy. We'll see how long I will last🙂
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.
If a "professor" is gatekeeping shit, use various sources. Be upfront about it. Tell them that they're the only experts about it. Don't give it up and whine how they're gatekeeping and stuff. Convince them to give you an answer. Sometimes professors really didn't know the answer either, they're humans who are simply labelled as "professor". You can't blame everything on them. Sure, they hold power, of course they do. But it doesn't mean that you'll give up just like that. You have to convince them you're worth listening to. I am not a professor but in my experience, you have to convince them whatever you're concerning about required their attention. Sometimes you worry about the most mundane stuff and brings it to them and realized you could just get the answer on Google. Also, for 3, I have mixed feelings, yes, we need as much access to information including those behind a paywall but we have to hear in mind, it's the internet, you can get good information for cheap and free, plus, you have public libraries and also archives. Obviously I advocate for free information than having to pay it but you gotta understand that it's not about you and your laziness but your willingness to find good information. You gotta show people that you're capable as a student/researcher and not just whine about how professor X is possibly Satan in a lab coat.
This is the result when universities are run by the business types. Have they asked themselves what values do they bring? Have they evaluated themselves similarly in their appointment, promotion, and salary increment? When the universities need to save money, who are the first persons to get laid off, their salaries becoming stagnant, and their pension contributions reduced? Yep, the academics! Why is it that most universities in the UK now have more administrative staff than academic staff?
But that's stupid. Why would a business wants to waste money on useless research? Why would they want to compromise the only product they're trying to sell?
@Lifeonthefastlane007 I think you misunderstand what i am saying. Could it be that you are not aware that universities in english speaking countries are run more and more by people with a business, finance, or corporate background? They don't intentionally jeopardise their products. But they put money making as a priority to the detriment of all else. Eg. Boeing.
I am very glad that my phd advisor is more old-school and doesnt really care if I only publish a single paper before my dissertation as long as my research is sound. I also find the trend to push towards publishing more and more papers (of mediocre quality and questionable novelty) that is coming from the anglosphere quite worrying (I work in Germany). Personally, I don't really see a benefit (for science overall) of publishing every single small incremental step rather than a longer journal article with more meat on the bone (if not even a patent). This also leads to a ridiculous workload being placed on reviewers who do their work pro-bono (and there are 3-4 reviewers per paper). I also don't think that researchers being bogged down with writing papers rather than doing (actual) research is really something academia should strive towards.
The worst thing is when you see cases of clearly frauds, I remember a researcher's google scholar profile that had 200+ entries on the same year... Like the year has 365 days, was he publishing once every 3 days including weekends? Is not that I doubt he contributed somehow to those papers, I doubt he read half of them. (Also topics were extremely varied, from security based on blockchain to biotechnology using AI)
I once stumbled upon a paper that had claims in the abstract that were not included or even mentioned elsewhere in the paper. It made me wonder about the quality control standards at that journal (I can't remember the name of the journal).
@@mysteryman480 Wanna see something fun? search for a classic method and a new technology (example: Bellman-Ford and Cuda) and watch the countless papers claiming to have "novel approach of the classic method with the new technology" no one has ever done.
There was a Japanese cartographer in the 19th century who could not get funding because no one but him found his work valuable; his name was Ino Tadataka, and he created a map of Japan so accurate that it singlehandedly boosted the entire country’s trade and logistics. Sometimes your work is valuable, but the people who decide what’s valuable are themselves worthless.
My experience in academia (broadly) was that only 2 things matter to the "administrative" tier: 1. How much research money are you bringing in? 2. See 1. There is very little actual consideration of the quality of your papers, or the relevance of your research topic or field. They don't even really care that much about the quantity of papers, unless you aren't publishing much, in which case they'll give you the "side-eye" about it. If the incoming money is large enough, even this can be forgiven, at least temporarily. Controversial/moral objections are often swept aside as long as the money is coming in - they only start to care if a public scandal arises (because this hurts donations or grants). But if you are bringing in the money, they really don't care about anything else. You would not believe some of the stories I acquired, sometimes firsthand, during my years in academia (across many institutions). As a student, I never thought academia was THAT mercenary. Maybe it wasn't always. It certainly is now. Your own research colleagues are the only people who care about the substance of your work. In general, "the department" and upwards really only cares about the grant money. And it's soul-crushing to the researchers who are actually trying to do something worthwhile or relevant.
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.
It is indeed a problem that has been discussed for years, but its just an extension of Goodhart's law at the end. Any other metric than publications or citations will eventually lead to the same result where researchers are incentivized to optimize the given metric rather than producing anything else
Bad metrics become a more significant problem as entities (because this is a problem in the corporate world, not just in academia) try to quantify performance more and more. There are, of course, incentives for them to do so - it avoids the potential for accusations of favoritism or bias. But it does lead to a lower quality of worker than simply letting managers make their own decisions. That's true even if you take into account the favoritism, bias, and blind spots of managers. The increase in efficiency is small enough that it doesn't outweigh the risk of lawsuits, so metric-based evaluation wins. Or at least, that's the case for large companies. Small companies still rely heavily on their management team to make judgment calls instead of turning them into functionaries. One of the reasons that I'm happier now managing for a smaller company where people would look at me like I was speaking a foreign language if I used terms like "KPI".
Why do you need a metric? It's like modern humans have lost their intuition. There is more to science than quantification. How can you compare the theory of gravity to the niche use of a chemical in a specific setting? You should hire people based on their character, work ethic and innovative thought not whether or not they are widely accepted by the masses.
I can see this happening.. I've seen departments where some people are very serious about their work while others are there to just work on something as an excuse to just fuck around
I feel your pain. Went through that at some point. The worst part is you work really hard on something, get somewhere and then you can't even get a conversation about it. Even if you give talks on your paper you will likely never get more than superficial comments. It has to do with how the system is set up, around rock stars, egos and popularity contests. It is fundamentally rigged for people that are narcissistic. It should be about real collaboration, joint discovery and human advancement... but it is a strange system that isn't designed by the people who are actually in it.
One paper with a 1000 citations, is better than 1000 papers with 1 citation each. Until the system changes to reflect the decline will continue. PS: I belong to the first category. I would not have a chance if I were to apply for a tenure-track position in academia.
I partially disagree with this notion. While I agree with what I assume is the core sentiment - a bigger focus on quality rather than quantity - focusing on the amount of citations carries much of the same issues. Senior researchers, who often are co-authors of papers, will still see their citations skyrocket compared to their younger peers. Niche research and negative results will be disfavored. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses will be given outsized importance. I don't believe we can ever fully escape the fact that judging researcher performance is always going to be flawed and subjective no matter which metrics you use.
I always wanted to be a researcher all my life. I quit just before applying for PhD positions when I realized that nothing matters in academia outside of generating revenue, with an out-of-scale competition even for short crappy academic positions, and it is mostly based on publishing papers with no real impact on the world. Every PhD student I know has quit academia as of now. Can academia get more depressing than this?
Of course it can get more depressing. With the emergence of AI, many questions in academia will be solved. Possibly, they don't need you and me anymore. But, the bright side is that maybe we do need help from AI, and that's alright. It's old topic now that AI helps more than it didn't. Needless to say, if you're really interested in solving the world's problems you would just solve it even without recognition or payment. But that won't makes sense, because if you look closely, academia, corporations, government still needs researchers, despite AI. It's pretty interesting if you think about it. More innovation simply means more brainwork instead of the opposite. I myself quit research because of lack of grant, but my own hindsight is that I don't even know what to research on in the first place without it sounding stupid. So I just continue studying valuable courses instead of research itself.
It depends on your motivation. Some want to do a PhD to satisfy their own quest for knowledge and don't intend to buy into academia at all. They are there for the quest, not the glory.
As an early career researcher I totally agree every word you said. You have summarized and explained very well. I enjoyed listening you. I hope I can see you as a one of the top scientists in the near future. Good luck bro.
at least in biomedical sciences the problem is worse. not only certain labs pushing a lot of papers, but often times you start reading an article and realize instantly that it comes from a paper mill and it is an utter and complete BS. What you are learning to do is to go to conferences and see who is actually doing great, breakthrough science and you follow them and their work
I left the academic path just because the pressure and the over hours I used on “writing papers” are just too huge. Nobody is going to read the paper I wrote then why I am putting so much effort with minimum PhD wages. I left and I am glad I made the choice. My salary is 5 times higher now
Papers are no longer created to be read, they are created to be counted. The fact that citations, and not its contents, are how a paper is evaluated is the problem.
And that’s why I’m just gonna twitter any new papers 🤷🏽♂️. The ideas need to spread to be talked about and tested not added to and lost in a checklist of the scientist publishing /study industrial complex 😮💨
For what it’s worth I am writing to be read but also know in the current climate no one will read it 😂. And this is how the Fermi paradox really happens
Interesting. I discussed this with my professor, a very senior and respected academic. He says that he built his career 30 years ago, but he is not sure how I could succeed nowadays. He admits that academia has become much more competitive since then, with many more publications, grants, students, etc. Young researchers still have to publish a lot of papers in high-quality journals, but this is no longer a guarantee of a good career and impact.
@@chuscienceI think things have to do with political climate too. Innovation and science wasn't as good as it now than back then, so your professor was right about him being needed because they're needed to get science to where it is today. On today's climate, I don't think it's impossible. It's up for young people like you to stop whining and just do whatever work needed. Sure, complaining is fun, it made you feel less guilty, however, I'm pretty sure we're aware that in the end, we simply just have to know many things, we need to work on our skills. What skills can you do in research? What are your ideas? If you have decent answer to this, I'm pretty sure you're alright.
Academia really judges your ability to obtain funding and grant-based resources. Academia will promote someone who can get money over someone with skills. Great video. New subscriber.
Someone who can get money has been successful in convincing an organisation to fund them, that their research would be valuable. A very good researcher who's hyper specialised in a very niche interest that nobody sees the value in will of course struggle to get funding. Funding has to provide some value, simply being good at research isnt providing value.
@@doghat1619 I agree partly with you. One challenge is we often do not know what will become useful (or valuable) or not. Also, what is useful or valuable is debatable in general, and debatable under the condition of limited resources.
I can remember professors talking about the study decline in the value and importance of papers as the volume has increased about 20 years ago. They also discussed the decline in the quality of teaching that went along with it.
At times, even when they're referenced, papers go unread. People simply require material to cite in their papers and may extract a few lines from the abstract without fully grasping the content. My most cited paper has garnered over 2000 citations, but I doubt all those authors have actually read it in its entirety.
Thank you for making this video. You explained the dilemma beautifully. I am in my junior year of undergrad and I had 1 year of experience working in a lab. The dread that I felt over publishing some paper that barely interested me and still required tons of hours of programming, research of other papers, writing the paper, was exhausting. I respect the decision of someone to want to stay in academia, but I will run far, far away from it.
Once I started my PhD it was quite eye-opening to see how many of my colleagues and other academics in my department had parents/grandparents/other family in academia; not to say there's anything wrong with that of course but with the academic landscape as it is it seems that its a lot harder to succeed without pre-existing connections that know how the game works
Stress, prestige, grants, pressure, pay-walls. No to change the world in a meaningful way, you have to have an audience. For long-form content that means blogs.
here is a likely solution: If you hold a position in academia while also working part-time in another field, such as industry, you'll find yourself less reliant on academic metrics. The citation system follows an exponential pattern, where older works gain popularity and significantly contribute to an individual's H-index, explaining around 80% of it.
As a first year PhD student, I relate a lot with what you said in the last comments of the "Publishing pressure" section. The will to be creative and to develop my own identity as a scientist is always trimmed by the pressure to publish in order to advance and achieve "relevant" positions as a scientist. Once I heard a scientist say that our evalutation of academic and scientific merit should not be a process that a computer could do alone, by merely counting some numbers and parameters. I absolutely agree with that idea, but it seems that without a major change, thing will converge exactly to the point where adimissions to post docs, PhDs and even to permanent positions will be made merely through numbers. Great video.
Hi friend, I feel very identified with your video, it really touched me deeply, I just finished a master in High Voltage, published in IEEE top journals and I have the same feeling as you, what a relief to know that there are people who are experiencing the same as one. I really appreciate your video, it would be great to chat one day.
Congrats!! I've been under constant publishing pressure and useless reportings since 1st yr, in the 2nd yr I started a job secretly so I safely quit . Now in the 3rd yr I am leaving this hell
Never think you are a bad academic. Your youtube channel is invaluable, as well as your papers. They may not be used right now but in the future they may be very used
This is precisely why I wanted to go into industry despite my love of math. As long as you can create value for your company doing what you love, then you can be as creative and diligent as you would like
You face similar challenges in the industry. The issue with founding is even more accelerated there and your project can be canceled at any time. Everything is about money (your solution has to be cost effective and easy to implement). Also selling your solutions to stakeholders is even more important than in academia
@danimaster6647 I agree to some extent. It's highly position dependent. If I can fulfill everything my employer asks of me and also generate value with my math projects, then, over time, I can spend an increasing amount of time on such math projects. In fact, I can eventually create a new team within the business. If it's all about money and I generate revenue which we otherwise wouldn't generate, then I earn greater freedom to do what I want to. With regards to stakeholders, that depends on the structure of the company. I've never worked somewhere so small or been so senior such that I'm actively interacting with stakeholders to the extent that they are aware of how I spend my time each month
@@nickh7681 I also agree to some extend since it's very true that the more value you create the more freedom you have. With "stakeholder" I meant the person who has an interest in your project and is involved in the founding part. In our company there is politics involved where sometimes great ideas are lost and others (which in my opinion) are dead ends are followed because of the opinion of some board members. The ressources which are allocated is also a matter of politics in our company. This isn't to say working in the industry is a bad joice. Above all you get proper money
mannn this stuff is terrifying. i'm a high schooler with a tentative love of math, but i don't actually know enough math to know exactly where my interests lie or if I'm even good at it, and everything i hear about academia and industry sounds horrific. maybe i should just grab an electrical engineering degree or something instead.
@jacksonsmith2955 If you love math and are good at it, then you have nothing to worry about. Stay humble, work diligently, and don't neglect practical skills like programming, machine learning, data science, etc. Also, don't forget to do the normal career stuff like networking and internships. If you're bright, you'll figure it out. Again, stay humble, be patient, and work diligently
Excellent contribution. I have thousands of citations, but I know people who never did any work, they don't even understand what is in the paper. They find people who put their names on papers and them. Then they turn around and brag that they are great.
I’m not in academia and not sure how this got recommended - very interesting talk about the nuances of academia and how it works. My professor tried to give me a rough summary of industry vs. academia/ professor when I was thinking about my future, but honestly don’t think I’m smart enough for pure academia - but to your point it seems it can be stressful and hard to become successful in academia and not always to focus on developing the models or whatever the paper itself is about
Everyone in academia wants their research to have an impact in the real world. Unfortunately impact in real world cannot be measured by citations or impact factor, which academia does.
I once read part of a biology paper outlining a method for determining the area under a curve. They called it the "Tai method". It worked by approximating the area as an ever greater sum of tiny rectangles. I thought it was funny because anyone who's gotten past high school math would simply recognize it as integration. This was written by PHDs.
Thank you for your video, very fresh and informative. Felt very honest. You are already contributing - if not in papers (due to the problems you mentioned), at least through this type of videos.
Great videa. It's so good that yoy are sharing your thoughts with the public. Having been going through similar thoughts and challenges myself, I have a few points that helped me grab my hand around this whole paper problem: -I saw many equations and I think you work on modelling/simulation. In such mathematical fields, much fewer citations are common because people tend less to rely on other people's models. In contrast, in psychology and human sciences, a lot more citations occur because they have to make their points by citing other qualitative arguments. So, 4 citations for a psychology paper published in 2021 is bad but maybe it is not that bad for your paper given the mathematical nature of your field. - At the end of the day, the number of citations, h-index, etc. do not matter that much. A serious hiring committee often hires experts in your field who read your papers and judge the scientific quality of them.
Thanks for the comment. Indeed, I had a few academic interviews recently and noticed that clever academics avoid suspicious researchers with tons of publications. They would rather invite an adequate person with a team mentality.
😂😂 I heard some academic discussions that “it is the computer scientists who have spoilt academia. They published a lot, so other researchers had to follow”.
@@chuscience Even in computer sciences, different subareas have drastically different life cycles for publishing a paper. It typically takes 3 months or less to finish a deep learning project while a year or more to finish an operating systems one.
its just the age of the science. more mature fields have longer history of established practices, higher barrier of entry in terms of novel contribution
I think there are two main problems to understand this: 1) Everyone can count, but few can read. Too often those people make hiring decisions. 2) Capitalist overproduction: The companies owning the journals extract wealth from the public sphere and they do that by selling papers written by publicly funded researchers. The more papers, the more they can sell. So they then lobby the government to implement policies that maximize their profit. It does not matter that the extreme output of papers does not necessarily translate to good science, as long as the money machine is alive and well.
Thank you for this video dear colleague! There is definitely a need for change. Worth part in all of this is that if you want to have a chance to work in academia, not only you need to publish, but also you need to publish in high ranked journals.
@ColdNavigatorand before that he lived as a delivery driver. Great. He also has no kids, because he never could have been able to afford them. So his bloodline is already dead and our human genome more dominated by imbeciles.
Imo my main problem with citation count as a metric is mainly two things: 1. if you look at the most cited papers in a field more often than not you will find some overview papers that just summarize prior research at the very top. I mean, yes, those papers are fine and important but without the original research before them they are nothing. 2. Sometimes there's research that is so advanced that only a small handful of other very top notch research groups on earth can make good use of those results even though they might allow for much better results than everything else.
I think its time to start discussing alternatives to the metrics used today, actual material things that we can ask institutions to do, to start to walk away to the horrible state of academia today. I havent tought of alternatives but i would like to see the discussion turning into what should academia be, and how do we get there
I am a PhD student at the second year of course. Generally I don't write comments on social media, nor I expose myself as I'm about to do. Because of this "publish or perish" mechanism I already lost the opportunity to became a professor in the future. The philosophy of my tutor (and so of the research group I joined) is old style: focus on the application, on the project, on the code, make everything work as best as possible, and finally (after many months or a year sometimes) prepare the paper. In the last months I realised that such philosophy doesn't create succesfull academics nor even professors. When I realised that I felt really bad, because I knew a pretty important door was closing for my future. I'm pretty sure I will not be able to became a professor, and that still bothers me a lot. Your video has been shocking for me. I suddenly realised that maybe the philosophy of my professor is not that wrong. Ok I have to forget the academic career, but still the knowledge and skills that I'm building are precious and valuable. You video changed my mind and my approach. Thank you so much
Thanks for sharing your story. You still might be able to get academic positions if you show other things on your CV, for example, various projects you worked on, collaborations with industry, patents, etc. But yeah, it will be difficult. You will be competing with other researchers who have dozens of journal papers. Talk to academics who you know. Maybe they can give you better advice on whether or not to stay in academia. Good luck with your PhD!
@@chuscience Thank you so much for the advices. You just obtained a new subscriber! You seem a very professional and capable researcher. Good luck for your career
60 citations in 3 years is amazing. What I found very dishartening when I saw that all the citations I get are just general citations in introduction like [12-24] and mine is 18 😂
True. I also noticed that my papers got cited in that way, which means that they were selected just because of their titles or abstract/figures, without a thoughtful intention to use/develop my work.
Same here. Out of about 30 citations, probably 5 are from my other work and 20 from general sentences. Then i get the researchgate notification "youve been cited!" Go to read said paper, and im like sooo why did they cite me? Just because it says bayesian in the title i guess
I just want to say that it is nice to see someone who cares about using vector images in their papers, it feels like many academics are playing a game of not enough jpeg with their figures.
Thanks for sharing your perspective on this. I have noted the overall quality of papers going down the toilet over the last ten years. Even when the research itself is good, the writing is badly in need of an editor; captions contain typos; figures are poorly designed and sloppy. And your comments suggest why this might be - the incentives at work in academia seem to be producing increasingly sloppy science communication as researchers prioritize quantity over quality.
Bravo. This needs to be discussed more openly within and without academia. The rot set in with the marketisation of universities, meaning only $$ matters. Universities no longer prioritise scholarship. They prioritise $$.
My friend was also in Phd and he said also that he was quite unmotivated writing papers since nobody will read them. He also had problems with supervisor that had problems with his papers.
Growing up until now, I have started to lose my sense of value for academic literature around this era. Given the recent scandals and the system you describe, it's hard to absolutely trust the results of a paper in any field, unless it's something so easily provable that you can even experiment with it in your own house. Generally, I have lost a lot of trust seeing how society itself behaves, and academia was no exception to this epidemic. You can only keep doing what you truly desire, or quit academia entirely and find your own suit in something that values your presence and does not abide to a broken underlying system.
Criticism in academia is warranted, but completely abandoning trust in published research leans me to think that maybe you haven’t spent much time in the research field in order to justifiably have that stance. Did you watch this video at all? You’re referencing scandals as your reasoning for ‘losing value in academia’ while his issue derives from the intense amount of time and effort in order to meet the level of scrutiny for publishing, and the low gratification resulting from that. Peer review isn’t perfect, but your lack of trust only shows that you probably haven’t been involved with the research field at all.
The most ironic thing is that anybody working in academia knows that these problems exist and everybody hates this system,. However, nobody is able to make the first move to change it (because everybody is so busy following the rules of the current system). Thank you for your video and your very clear exposition.
Academia is beholden to the dictate of fiscal capture, just as theory must work within natural laws. In this generation of scientists and statisticians, every knowledge worker must be smarter than a generative pretrained transformer.
I work in the industry and occasionally publish conference papers with PhD students we cooperate with. Our papers are more industrial and engineering oriented. And I’m proud to say our papers do provide valuable insights for industry at least, and we got some follow up query from industrial partners. And in my daily engineering role, I also often search for prior art and read carefully the most relevant papers. Mostly conference papers, almost never journal papers. And I do ignore the only academia oriented papers, because they are too theoretical and no practical engineering implementation mentioned, and of course very often too difficult for me to even read through the formulas in the academic papers, let alone understanding them. For the papers I coauthored, most of the time I’m responsible for most part of the implementation and validation experiments, and also 70% of the whole draft of the papers. And yes, when I’m writing a paper with a submission deadline, I work till midnight and on weekends. And when we look for conferences to submit to, we prefer IEEE or ACM as the basic requirements. Then we look at the committee. We’d like to see committee members from the industry, preferably from our customer companies. If the committee consists of only professors, the conference won’t be at the top of our list. And yes, we often got the comment from our professors partners that our paper is not academic enough. But I also want to mention, the professors cooperate with our company, are smart and very knowledgeable people. The professors ask good questions and provide good insights and help us sharpen our research direction and experiment design. In short, I love working with academias as an engineer in Industry. I guess I won’t be happy in a die hard academic environment. I love engineering and I love to have some good academic guidance for my industrial research. I love writing papers to present my industrial research results.
Thank you for sharing your story! Sounds like a great balance between publishing and implementation. May I ask you how many papers you write or co-author per year? Andrey
My father is an academia for all his life, he and his boss are still not retired (his boss is in his 90s and still working). From very young age I had experience of father was always working during the day, lab experience in the night, and back to his office during weekend. After I graduated from master, I said No to PHD for this reason. It’s great to see young people are interested in academic work, but to me it means lots of work, less of pay(compare to private) and no time for your family. Good luck to everyone on this journey, hope the future is different.
That's true. I know a few academics who are 70 years old (not 90 - sounds like an extreme case). I cannot understand why one should lead a lab or projects at that age.
Every comment here: I published a paper on how to make our *killer replacement AI robots for Skynet* but nobody read it as everyone else is focused on publishing papers about how to make our *killer replacement AI robots for Skynet* , and I feel underappreciated and lonely.
I don't totally agree with everything said, but I'm glad someone from academia is standing up and willing to discuss these issues cause... They're real issues! We all have and/or keep suffering from these problems and side effects. So I'm happy to see this type of discussion being brought up to light. Thank you for the video.
very interesting perspective I have never thought about research in this way before (don't have any experience yet just a masters student). thanks for making the video and best of luck for your future.
Better not get into this grind while you still have time. When you really have something novel, the motivation to publish will automatically come. Only then you publish. Until then, get an actual job
Thank you for this reality check. I see some researchers in Psychology cope with this by for example dissect the same dataset multiple times, for different research questions each time. I saw one Post Doc publishing about 20 papers a year, all with the same dataset. Its a weird system.
What you were talking about with Ai reminds me of my theory of work emails in the future. You have one coworker, who puts the main topic of an email into ChatGPT which then creates a nice formal work email, which then gets sent to colleagues. The colleagues then copy/paste this email into ChatGPT, get the summary, then use ChatGPT to write their own reply emails... which the original coworker then puts into ChatGPT to get the summary. I wonder if this will happen. Data and intentions fed to ChatGPT and papers published using this Ai help, just for another individual to feed ChatGPT the full formal paper and get the summary. I call it Balloon Theory. What you want is the material, but it's just filled with Ai(r)
Obviously an alternative to papers is needed, so that focus is removed from the paper publishing. I would suggest a new format is needed. One example is large scale collaboration such as the IPCC reports. The scientists will not be measured for their individual contributions in the form of a finished paper, but will be judged for the overall work.
The impact of the article is mainly personal. This is why most people don't care about citations. Why did you start the article in the first place? Was it to make an impact on others or on yourself? Research is a mix of personal fulfillment and impact on others. We aim to convince others that our research is good enough to be published. Once completed, one day people will be interested in your research. That's why we do collaborations. The problem is not in the declining values, but just in the metrics. People are more concerned about publishing than getting something relevant for themselves.
I know exactly where you're coming from. I spent 45+ years teaching---secondary school through doctoral levels---and I, too, published my share of academic papers. Long ago I realized the emptiness and futility of this publishing cycle. And in all the years of all these academics publishing so-called learned papers, not a one has found a cure for cancer, let alone the common cold. Now that I'm out of academia, I sit back and think, "All these papers----no more than glorified BS and fluff & puff."
Hey flexibleflyer50, where will the people who like science go instead ? Conducting their own research independently ? It all seem so bleak. I don't know what waters I'm dipping my toe in. In my context : I'm a nursing student in France and it is required of us to publish ≈30 pages to be certified (among other things) at the end of the last year (3 years in total). P.S. : I'm not looking for a lazy way to circumvent it (although it is becoming a sadly common practice to plagiarise from a machine/human). I've tried picking the best terms to explain my perspective. Hope you're having a good day, AAAHHHHAHHAHHAAH
@@aaahhhhahhahh I've had many colleagues who left the academic grind, opened their own businesses, or went to work for companies. Options are out there. One chemist began her own business right in the house----creating flavors for food products and then scents for a line of bath products. She now has a thriving business.
Hi. If you haven't worked in experimental biology I could explain why there probably won't ever be a single cure for cancer (and coming up with a useful new treatment for any one form is monstrously hard) - and why curing the common cold isn't one of those easy little problems like sending a spacecraft to Mars. People aren't fooling around out there. All best.
I left academia in Germany, because once I spent 5 years in it I saw how rotten it was. Supervisor professor that sneaks as coauthor in every paper without major contribution, use of dependent variables that can produce results even when results are not there, corruption among reviewers and supervisor, that know one another and push one another's papers, replication of major studies with very fine changes and shamelessly claiming that is totally new concept etc etc. All points that you mention are true.
I did my PhD and postdoc in biomedical sciences in the US. My observation was similar to yours and I don’t want to go back to academia. But finding a job in the industry is very tough right now. All the best for your future endeavors.
Thanks for this video. As someone finishing a PhD in chemistry, I was interested in academia when I started, but I'm now looking at exclusively jobs in industry because I am so tired of the publish or perish climate in academia with so many good papers that go unread because everyone is focusing on their own work. My third paper was just accepted for publication, and it's the one I'm most proud of. Even if it gets relatively ignored, I'm happy about the insights that I was able to contribute in it.
In academics, your CV is your "employment insurance." If you have many high quality publications, you are unlikely to be fired, and if fired, you will be able to find employment elsewhere. However, few and poor quality publications, means you could lose your job, and finding another job will be difficult. Grant funding is also important.
You seem to have opened your eyes on the old paradigm: "publish or perish". The issues that you discuss have been known to poison academia for decades. Bureaucrats lead academia and academics let them do that. Note that among bureaucrats you have a bunch of low-level scientists who managed to stay in academia and make the life of good scientists a nightmare. What you call "successful professors" are those who, for some reason, enjoy the benefits of a large network. Together with the volume of publications, the volume of coauthors should be considered to better see that "successful authors" are those who make tiny scientific contributions in papers. They "supervise" the work, which means they get the grants and pay PhD students and postdocs to do the real scientific work: research. Best of luck to you.
I am an auto-didact, coming from an agricultural background, my work is in neuro-symbol networks. Point is, I've been on a team working together on an open-source Arcology project. My colleagues are academics, and I must say it is baffling. I work to make the best system I can, I want my work to be good and solid, trying to make the systems I would want to use in the field. My work I release public domain, seems to me that make sense as impact is my value. I have found this is completely different from their perspective. They seem to see academia and the journals as literally "science". As if the institution itself is science, not just a system build around it. The focus seems to be on funding and getting grants, constantly talking about grants, it is tiresome. They have plans for papers, and a journal, and etc. Like you say in the video, paper publishing and grant acquisition seem the highest priorities. The continued propagation of the institution seems to be the priority of those who are trained by the institution.
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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.
Good point! I did not mention it in the video: academics are very busy and do not read many papers. Some of them are just tired of reading about similar trendy ideas and minor improvements in their field. So we have millions of students publishing papers, but who actually reads them? According to my statistics, my papers are usually cited by other PhD students and sometimes postdocs.
@@chuscience The truth is that very few people are going to read your paper unless it is relevant to their own career. Therefore, we are effectively punished for doing pioneer work, since it requires a huge effort to advertise it and convince people they should learn it. I miss the days when it was actually excusible to just spend time simply learning without feeling bad about it
Would AI analysis of papers help? There are LLMs that gobble up papers in minutes, spitting out only what you need of them.
Just like any business with it's KPI's..... This is not science, it's a business, the educational business. Im most parts of the world it doesn't even pay well... I would have loved to be a researcher, but all of these things made me not want to do it.
@kw1ksh0t care to share a link to your paper here & stíck it to the Man ?
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
According to me, I agree with this sentiment!
I like searching ArXiv to see if there are any papers that have already explored solutions to some random math problem I came up with. As long as the submitted papers have correct math, more is better for that specific use case.
Seconded, this comment is now peer reviewed
I saw this comment, but have read no scientific papers today.
That's science! 🤣
🤣
That's why single authored articles should carry much weight in promotions. Some professors are gaming the system with co-authors.
They are gaming the system by using graduate students too.
That will become problematic too. They will find ways to have more single-authored papers.
How? There are ways. For examples, keep recycling old ideas and old papers; and dig up those old abandoned ideas and papers (even as a mid-career researcher, I have a huge number of these, maybe as many as my published first-authored papers). Nothing will get discarded now.
Also, you can cut up the results to create more papers. Maybe you used to write one or two papers for an idea before. Now, you cut up your research into more smallest publishable units.
Having too many single-authored may also be a sign that the authors have difficult personality in the work environment, dislike team work, do not collaborate, etc.
What is rare will be considered valuable. Then in the future, someone in a YT comment will write that's why we need to put more weight to coauthored papers.
Most places only count corresponding author and first author in promotions and hiring. Being a simple co-author is absolutely meaningless these days.
@@sunway1374 Single author papers are BAD. Everything NEEDS to be peer reviewed, which means you NEED co authors. Saying otherwise is ignororant. No you are not Einstein. If you don't like team work, get out of college, and go teach it and read the textbook yourself. If you don't like it, STOP COMPLAINING AND GROW UP. Something this generation needs to DO.
@@grdfhrghrggrtwqqu Did you reply to the wrong person? Read my comment again. I didn't say single-authored papers are good. In fact, quite the opposite could be what I have meant, although even then I didn't say papers with multiple authors are good.
Also, you don't know me, why do you think I am in a college and of "this generation"?
I don't know you... But from your comment, I guess you are not very experienced in the journal paper publication process.
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.
no, that doesn't make your negative comments suddenly make sense. If they were actively developing a competing approach, then they would have the knowledge to understand the material. It seems far more likely that the negative comments were left there to gaslight you into wasting your time while they developed a superior approach or at least a copy cat of your own approach. By the way, that isn't 100% at all. So I plainly disagree that the intent behind their comments got cleared up, UNLESS you're assuming they have bad intentions from the get-go. But that is a very specific line of thinking and you are missing several other potential motivators leading to the same outcome you experienced.. But anyway, I get you. You should paste your paper onto the net somehow though, so they can't claim they came up with your idea before you published.
@@snared_ Yes I was assuming bad faith
@@snared_No, that doesn't necessarily mean that they were developing a superior method or copying his techniques. At the end of the day you and OP are just speculating. Whatever their intentions were it most likely wasn't good.
@@Rust_Rust_Rust too many smart people in this comment section. for once everything i wanna say have already been said
@snared_ and that's why preprints exist...
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. 😅
Your perseverance here should be rewarded, but sadly the audience may be so limited that it won't be. In the 60s those researchers probably felt less publishing pressure than now.
I wouldn't know if competition and prestige has changed since then also.
wait, so the work is important because in the future someone will realize it is already done? what a ponzi scheme
Edit: it is a ponzi scheme because its existance is only justified by its existance. Didnt think I had to clarify this.
Please dont answer it is not, im reducing to absurd. Not a big reduction though, as of today
@lucaxtshotting2378 They probably solved an internal problem and then published the results
@@gsuekbdhsidbdhd even more strict of a ponzi scheme then.
I'm sure they make some progress, it's hard to believe it is worth the money and other resources. It's not like Open AI and not university of Toronto is king of Rohan
the other way around*. Open AI is indeed king of Rohan
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.
view != citation. citation ~= comment
BIG math
Such a big brain, no wonder you are a PhD.
@@sculd2 citation is another video mentioning this video. comment is similar to a review.
Dr., do you understand the difference between reading an article and citing an article?
The problem is aggravated by the fact that it is often difficult for editors to find qualified academics who are willing to act as peer reviewers. They aren't paid and often remain anonymous afterwards so that they get neither remuneration nor credit for their work. No wonder many academics are unwilling to take on this unpaid work when they already have so much else to do. It is not easy to see a solution to this. Paying peer reviewers would obviously create all sorts of new problems.
Not being paid is actually quite the essence of maintaining quality of peer review.
@@SuperFalcoFalco How so?
BTW: in most countries people are paid for reviewing grant applications or eg. PhD thesis.
@@grzegorzach3891 well as the original comment stated: " Paying peer reviewers would obviously create all sorts of new problems". I just don't see how paying would improve the quality (!) of peer review. It might be easier to find reviewers, yes. But are there really so many people right now who think: "Man if i would get paid a little, i would actually take this review more serious and make sure its a real quality review." Peer reviewing lives from scientists who have a strong idealism of wanting to maintain quality in literature, no money is gonna change that.
Could you explain further please I'm really interested ngl
I can relate to this.. there are tons of stuff to do and peer reviewing a paper takes several days to properly do it. It’s very time consuming…..
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."
You have to realize the purpose of scientific research is to advance understanding, right?
Scientific papers being hard to understand is a good thing, because it means the research being discussed is breakthrough or at least innovative.
Also, since a scientific paper is supposed to be novel, you don't really want to be teaching it to people until it is well proven and/or tested, even if it's published; I've found many cited papers that turned out to be incorrect after new research comes out.
Educational material is already out there but it's too expensive, it should be free.
You're saying it's a good thing papers are hard to understand? Are you serious? Please tell that to the thousands of PhD students who are trying to get introduced into a field by reading papers, and struggle massively with it, because the way they're written does not promote understanding in any way. It's pointless, dehumanizing, and causes a ton of mental damage. I couldn't disagree more.
@@Avento8
Seriously? Mental damage? Then perhaps you're truly not meant for this field...
We don't need researchers who struggle with understanding anything. We need people who have the capability of furthering human understanding, not these people who make worthless recycled papers.
We had a fair share of those at my university, those people who barely understood the field they were in, and got by publishing compilation papers that did nothing.
You can condescend and insult all you want, but mental health issues among PhDs are significantly higher than in the general population. So is the suicide rate. Denying it won't make it less so.
Your argument is of the form, "This is how it's always been, so that's how it's supposed to be." While mine is of the form "This is what people really need and what would be helpful, so that's what we should do." Which is stronger? ;-)
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.
Yeah and this is bad. Why would you justify this? Academia is supposed to have a higher goal than personal profit. I think we're in sorry times where colleges are just another greedy business.
I think it's sad as fuk, why don't you?
All this money that comes in, and then where does it go? Don't we see a problem with this? Tuition is rising steeply, more and more students are being priced out and unable to meet the shortfalls with other forms of assistance, all while the PhDs are being dutiful little slaves trying to bring in the money, and plenty of other sources of money are rolling in and yet.......what? Are all the universes employees then paid comfortably and fairly and his tuition kept reasonable? Not in most places.
So the university is nothing but a profit seeking machine then? Just another business? Well isn't that just so enlightened.
I have a lot of problems with this. Apparently you don't. Again I ask you, where the hell does all this money go???
Are you aware that according to more and more reports that have surfaced the majority of staff and support staff at universities are poorly paid???
Apparently postdocs have a shameful record of job security because they're given appallingly short work contracts from their superiors, from 2 mos to 3 years tops. I should think this would be unacceptable. Most people want some security in their job, it doesn't have to be set in stone, but it is completely unfair to any worker especially a professional credentialed staff worker to provide them next to no predictability and longer-term contract so they can plan their life accordingly.
I mean this shit sounds exploitative af don't you see it???
About the money - so basically the University president is your pimp and you're supposed to be their loyal bitch and if you're not bringing in enough money your career is going to go down the toilet- yeah? A crass but apt analogy yes???
Also are you aware that the presence of medium and large and universities has a disastrous knock-on effect of local rent prices? now local city councils are to blame for this because they refuse to enact rent control because they're corrupt trolls, but yes, universities do this whether they intend to or not. Also, are you aware that many colleges and universities pay zero taxes and contribute very little to their surrounding economy? I wonder if you're aware of any of this.
I know we've all been trained to view the university as this august refined altruistic institution that is nothing but beatific and a positive in every way but unfortunately, whether they intend to or not, they bring a lot of negative with them.
Looks like there's a lot of crookedness that goes on at the top level of university management. Because right now I don't see anything that they're doing as ethical.
Not sure if greater regulation (specific laws) would change this. Still looking into that.
Yes, that's what I observed and concluded too. People still talk about publish or perish, like having papers is sufficient. No, no, no.
You need to have grants. The more the better, the larger the better. And that is sufficient. It's been "Grants or perish" for at least 2 decades now.
And yet you're paid shit for this. Or at least not very well apparently. Lol. Ok well I think it's awesome that universities have become nothing but small corporations today.
@@sunway1374 This is true. However without the papers you don't get the grants
Now it may be that someone has superior journal output and doesn't get the grant vs. someone who only has average journal output who doesnt
This can also come down to how well the grant was written and novelty, etc.
@@praphael
OK. But papers are much easier to get than grants. And you don't need great papers to get a grant.
I know people who have many papers but never get a tenure (inc. me), and others who have many papers and even written books but never rise above associate prof.
All because we have never been PI of a large enough grant.
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.
جسارتا در چه حوزه ای؟
@@amir-ng6jv If he replied truthfully, he would indeed be brave (and also stupid).
in my field it is pretty much the same
Academia is a giant scam with an insane noise to signal ratio. 80-90% of papers can't even be replicated.
The reality is that a tiny amount of paper are great and have huge impact.
It's a winner takes all field. Like all information fields where the best/most popular can capture the entire market.
Academia is just another Hollywood.
I wrote a paper for school just to get some experience and while i was researching found out the main papers i was citing were from a field with that kind of peer reviewing done mostly to make money. It was kind of sickening bc it was supposed to be research on how to improve ppls mental health and instead was just a waste of the public’s money and created a lot of misconceptions in the field that ppl still believe today
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?
Nice analogy with composers😅 Will remember it for future discussions!
Exactly. Mozart wrote 41 symphonies but for the most part the first 30 or so are ignored compared to the study of his later ones like no. 39 or no. 41. Same for Haydn, he wrote 100+ but many haven't even heard any of the first 90. Meanwhile Beethoven wrote 9, all of which are highly revered. Many music scholars don't fall into the "your papers are your career" category, anyway, considering the additional achievements of performances, clinics, and masterclasses. Though publications of course are part of it
Spot on
What would be the alternative solution ? You think a university has the time, the energy or the ability to read the work of every single one of their workforce ? Going from Mayan history to particule physics through the biology of the shrimp or the sociology of birthday parties ? And even then, measuring the quality of a paper is quite subjective.
Of course they need easy, understandable metrics to make a choice. No matter how flawed their are.
@@alioshax7797the alternative is probably not capitalism, at least not the runaway form of it we see around us today. As long as everyone is beholden to the almighty dollar, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake will forever be a secondary consideration.
Even many of the great composers had to spend time writing and playing for their patrons to make ends meet. Some died penniless, and some were barely recognized and appreciated in their own time. Only through the focused lens of history do we truly understand their lasting contributions to the field.
The same can be said for countless novelists, painters, and inventors throughout history.
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.
It's a shame
Why #3?
@@GuyMichaelyit gives you competitive advantage when developing the new methods/new experiments. Don't want to release code and then get scooped on some idea extension. Sort of trading off impact for paper quantity
I agree with 1, 2, and 3. I am a programmer, so no on 4. 5 is good only with endless editing and revision. I do not agree with the willingness to sacrifice honesty.
What an abomination of a system we have made. Research is made only in the name of making enough money to barely scrape by and if you get any inkling of an idea sprouting from research you need to hide it to yourself so you can hopefully continue to have medical insurance and maybe money left over for a bag of rice
Why do i have a feeling that every single person in our society is totally exhausted
Read Byung Chul Han.
Because it's true.
plateau
Late stage capitalism
@@marsaeolus9248 no you're just terminally and chronically online so you just choose to exist in this sphere of negativity. Get off twitter, politics and touch some grass
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.
What small improvements? How do you know it's an improvement?
tell her to go private
Your sister does not like the shit she should leave.
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?
Ponzi sceme
MLM?
I think somebody* has a "Law" to the effect that once any particular measure is selected as an index of quality and used to give rewards, people in that field work to maximise that one measure, and it stops being a useful index.
That's where "Number of publications to your name" falls down, because of the formation of publishing cartels. Three people in one lab chop up every experiment or study into three, and spread the data and analysis over three papers under their names in a different order, plus of course the head of department and a few people. So to make sense of it you have to read all three papers.
The big boss has his name on all of them, and gets a bigger citation number: but that's OK, because editors see his name and accept the paper, though he may not even have read it.
This system works to the benefit of the "big bosses" who run laboratories or research groups, so they are not going to change it. What does it measure in reality? The ability to organise a group of researchers and crack the whip to keep them both working and publishing. That's what the University Grants Committee wants, and what the university's own own hierarchy is monitoring.
No one person can evaluate the worth of an Assyriologist, a Molecular Biologist and a Health Economist, but the committee members can all look at the numbers and compare them with those of similar academic rank elsewhere.
* Goodhart's Law.
This is a known feature, not a bug. Because the experiments in high-energy research are massive, everyone who works on some aspect of them in the collaboration is listed on every paper that comes out. Also these experiments are expensive, so every country that contributes wants their researchers to be listed.
Every time CERN thinks they've found something, their thousands of scientists rush out papers on the subject. They we get a "never mind". Wake me when you all actually have found something interesting. (Yawn...)
When you learnt your job at 5-star restaurant, and realize you ended up in a fast food restaurant instead
😂
@@MorTobXD civilized, vegan, cheap. For restaurants, Pick two, should be doable.
classist statements like that are why it is so bad. the only cure is full freedom of all information. transparency is the only way.
classism, assuming the fast food eater must be an uneducated hoard, and that the academia goer isnt some nepotism yacht club scholarship is the exact reason why this happens.
theres good people who are privleged and theres good people who are not.
when someone denies the "fast food eaters" an education, equal access, they've created classist slavery. when they put the privlege folk into a position theyre born into, they are also robbed of their potential expertise. we're all equal and creating a system of illusions to say otherwise creates lies about cancer.
Let me fix that statement
"When you learnt your job at 5-star restaurant, and realize you ended up in a fast food restaurant instead cause your not a 5-star restaurant chef"
@@Ekornpro So, you wanna say, 5-star restaurants do exist in science?
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.
Not surprised. Most papers are buried. The more you discuss about your work, the more people know about it.
Well, partially, this is true. However
1. Travelling, preparing and giving talks takes time from research
2. To be invited to a conference you need resources. If your supervisor has resources to give you many opportunities to speak is one thing. Otherwise, it is hard to be invited to speak anywhere.
3. Conferences are no longer as they are supposed to be. Nobody listens, everyone is typing their own papers during talks. Or sleeping, or watching football.
Actually, as I got permanent job in academia I almost stopped going to conferences. I don't quite see the point except tourism. I almost never get any valuable feedback. Concerning the other talks, usually, people are just recycling the old stuff. There is nothing interesting and speakers behave as sales managers. In case there is anything interesting I'd rather read a paper my self, not wasting time one useless sales interprises.
@@dmitry5319 that's the catch
@@dmitry5319 Make your talk interesting to the audience and they will listen.
Good thinking! It's certainly a form of advertising, which the video author is not considering.
So true. After 50 successful years at the top of academia, I now nouce that 80% of papers submitted for publication are simply rehash of old research by yourself and others, which peer reviewers are so unfamilar with the history of the discipline (due to the avalanche of largely irrelevant papers,) they frequently don't even notice.
How do you propose a solution? I see the same thing.
@@o1-preview Maybe AI can help.
Congratulations on the video. I stumbled on it from the YT algo. What you are saying is totally true. I just quit my postdoc for a job in the industry and you cannot imagine how the past months have been so relaxing not having to worry anymore about publishing new papers every second of my free time. I never worked on weekends nor evenings but I was always thinking in my free times about coming up with the next great paper and how to milk more the same models. This is coming from someone that had more than 2x the average paper output during the PhD in my department and have just published my last paper in Nature. I am so glad that I no longer need to worry about checking my citation count on ADS when I turn on the computer in the morning...
Congrats on getting a normal job! I am currently the last postdoc remaining in my team. The other 4 postdocs I knew have already left for industry, and feel happy. We'll see how long I will last🙂
What is your field, and does your job in industry also involve research?
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.
Yup, a young academic has to compete with someone with 40+ years and still produce an interesting paper. How is that fair in any normal field?
There are few things i detest more than an "old boys club" situation. Which this sounds very much like.
If a "professor" is gatekeeping shit, use various sources. Be upfront about it. Tell them that they're the only experts about it. Don't give it up and whine how they're gatekeeping and stuff. Convince them to give you an answer. Sometimes professors really didn't know the answer either, they're humans who are simply labelled as "professor". You can't blame everything on them. Sure, they hold power, of course they do. But it doesn't mean that you'll give up just like that. You have to convince them you're worth listening to.
I am not a professor but in my experience, you have to convince them whatever you're concerning about required their attention. Sometimes you worry about the most mundane stuff and brings it to them and realized you could just get the answer on Google. Also, for 3, I have mixed feelings, yes, we need as much access to information including those behind a paywall but we have to hear in mind, it's the internet, you can get good information for cheap and free, plus, you have public libraries and also archives. Obviously I advocate for free information than having to pay it but you gotta understand that it's not about you and your laziness but your willingness to find good information. You gotta show people that you're capable as a student/researcher and not just whine about how professor X is possibly Satan in a lab coat.
@@dxq3647so you want to compete with who then? A kindergartner?
@@Lifeonthefastlane007 Compete with none, because the academia should be working together for progress, not against one another
This is the result when universities are run by the business types.
Have they asked themselves what values do they bring? Have they evaluated themselves similarly in their appointment, promotion, and salary increment?
When the universities need to save money, who are the first persons to get laid off, their salaries becoming stagnant, and their pension contributions reduced? Yep, the academics!
Why is it that most universities in the UK now have more administrative staff than academic staff?
Yes, universities should be almost entirely public institutions, with two primary goals: 1. To educate 2. To create new knowledge
But that's stupid. Why would a business wants to waste money on useless research? Why would they want to compromise the only product they're trying to sell?
@Lifeonthefastlane007 I think you misunderstand what i am saying. Could it be that you are not aware that universities in english speaking countries are run more and more by people with a business, finance, or corporate background?
They don't intentionally jeopardise their products. But they put money making as a priority to the detriment of all else. Eg. Boeing.
@@Lifeonthefastlane007Why would they allocate so many funds to useless administrative staff
@@Lifeonthefastlane007Why do they get do deem it useless? Why is the only useful research the research that makes a line go up?
I am very glad that my phd advisor is more old-school and doesnt really care if I only publish a single paper before my dissertation as long as my research is sound. I also find the trend to push towards publishing more and more papers (of mediocre quality and questionable novelty) that is coming from the anglosphere quite worrying (I work in Germany). Personally, I don't really see a benefit (for science overall) of publishing every single small incremental step rather than a longer journal article with more meat on the bone (if not even a patent). This also leads to a ridiculous workload being placed on reviewers who do their work pro-bono (and there are 3-4 reviewers per paper). I also don't think that researchers being bogged down with writing papers rather than doing (actual) research is really something academia should strive towards.
The worst thing is when you see cases of clearly frauds, I remember a researcher's google scholar profile that had 200+ entries on the same year...
Like the year has 365 days, was he publishing once every 3 days including weekends?
Is not that I doubt he contributed somehow to those papers, I doubt he read half of them.
(Also topics were extremely varied, from security based on blockchain to biotechnology using AI)
I once stumbled upon a paper that had claims in the abstract that were not included or even mentioned elsewhere in the paper. It made me wonder about the quality control standards at that journal (I can't remember the name of the journal).
@@mysteryman480 Wanna see something fun? search for a classic method and a new technology (example: Bellman-Ford and Cuda) and watch the countless papers claiming to have "novel approach of the classic method with the new technology" no one has ever done.
100% hes taking obscure journals and yanking them to publish in high impact journals
Fraud
Rockstar professor with many grad students in a fast moving field, it is possible
There was a Japanese cartographer in the 19th century who could not get funding because no one but him found his work valuable; his name was Ino Tadataka, and he created a map of Japan so accurate that it singlehandedly boosted the entire country’s trade and logistics. Sometimes your work is valuable, but the people who decide what’s valuable are themselves worthless.
My experience in academia (broadly) was that only 2 things matter to the "administrative" tier:
1. How much research money are you bringing in?
2. See 1.
There is very little actual consideration of the quality of your papers, or the relevance of your research topic or field. They don't even really care that much about the quantity of papers, unless you aren't publishing much, in which case they'll give you the "side-eye" about it. If the incoming money is large enough, even this can be forgiven, at least temporarily. Controversial/moral objections are often swept aside as long as the money is coming in - they only start to care if a public scandal arises (because this hurts donations or grants). But if you are bringing in the money, they really don't care about anything else.
You would not believe some of the stories I acquired, sometimes firsthand, during my years in academia (across many institutions).
As a student, I never thought academia was THAT mercenary. Maybe it wasn't always. It certainly is now.
Your own research colleagues are the only people who care about the substance of your work. In general, "the department" and upwards really only cares about the grant money. And it's soul-crushing to the researchers who are actually trying to do something worthwhile or relevant.
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 😀
Prove it.
Congratulations
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.
It is indeed a problem that has been discussed for years, but its just an extension of Goodhart's law at the end. Any other metric than publications or citations will eventually lead to the same result where researchers are incentivized to optimize the given metric rather than producing anything else
Bad metrics become a more significant problem as entities (because this is a problem in the corporate world, not just in academia) try to quantify performance more and more. There are, of course, incentives for them to do so - it avoids the potential for accusations of favoritism or bias. But it does lead to a lower quality of worker than simply letting managers make their own decisions. That's true even if you take into account the favoritism, bias, and blind spots of managers. The increase in efficiency is small enough that it doesn't outweigh the risk of lawsuits, so metric-based evaluation wins. Or at least, that's the case for large companies. Small companies still rely heavily on their management team to make judgment calls instead of turning them into functionaries. One of the reasons that I'm happier now managing for a smaller company where people would look at me like I was speaking a foreign language if I used terms like "KPI".
What about just frankly and honestly measuring how much MONEY someone is brings in?
That would be one metric that would be hard to fudge.
Why do you need a metric? It's like modern humans have lost their intuition. There is more to science than quantification. How can you compare the theory of gravity to the niche use of a chemical in a specific setting? You should hire people based on their character, work ethic and innovative thought not whether or not they are widely accepted by the masses.
"good luck with your papers" - I grinned as I turned back to my overleaf tab
I can see this happening.. I've seen departments where some people are very serious about their work while others are there to just work on something as an excuse to just fuck around
I feel your pain. Went through that at some point. The worst part is you work really hard on something, get somewhere and then you can't even get a conversation about it. Even if you give talks on your paper you will likely never get more than superficial comments. It has to do with how the system is set up, around rock stars, egos and popularity contests. It is fundamentally rigged for people that are narcissistic. It should be about real collaboration, joint discovery and human advancement... but it is a strange system that isn't designed by the people who are actually in it.
become anarchist. all is hopeless. the masses are hopeless. there are two species of humans.
What are the two species?
@@einwd You are part of the problem if that's your worldview.
One paper with a 1000 citations, is better than 1000 papers with 1 citation each.
Until the system changes to reflect the decline will continue.
PS: I belong to the first category. I would not have a chance if I were to apply for a tenure-track position in academia.
you just substituted one bullshit metric for another
I partially disagree with this notion. While I agree with what I assume is the core sentiment - a bigger focus on quality rather than quantity - focusing on the amount of citations carries much of the same issues. Senior researchers, who often are co-authors of papers, will still see their citations skyrocket compared to their younger peers. Niche research and negative results will be disfavored. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses will be given outsized importance.
I don't believe we can ever fully escape the fact that judging researcher performance is always going to be flawed and subjective no matter which metrics you use.
@@moumouzel Well, research is full of bullshit metrics. It's what we do, we draw the line.
At least 1000 papers will give you 1000 ideas for your own research
I always wanted to be a researcher all my life. I quit just before applying for PhD positions when I realized that nothing matters in academia outside of generating revenue, with an out-of-scale competition even for short crappy academic positions, and it is mostly based on publishing papers with no real impact on the world. Every PhD student I know has quit academia as of now.
Can academia get more depressing than this?
Of course it can get more depressing. With the emergence of AI, many questions in academia will be solved. Possibly, they don't need you and me anymore.
But, the bright side is that maybe we do need help from AI, and that's alright. It's old topic now that AI helps more than it didn't.
Needless to say, if you're really interested in solving the world's problems you would just solve it even without recognition or payment. But that won't makes sense, because if you look closely, academia, corporations, government still needs researchers, despite AI. It's pretty interesting if you think about it. More innovation simply means more brainwork instead of the opposite.
I myself quit research because of lack of grant, but my own hindsight is that I don't even know what to research on in the first place without it sounding stupid. So I just continue studying valuable courses instead of research itself.
It depends on your motivation. Some want to do a PhD to satisfy their own quest for knowledge and don't intend to buy into academia at all. They are there for the quest, not the glory.
As an early career researcher I totally agree every word you said. You have summarized and explained very well. I enjoyed listening you. I hope I can see you as a one of the top scientists in the near future. Good luck bro.
at least in biomedical sciences the problem is worse. not only certain labs pushing a lot of papers, but often times you start reading an article and realize instantly that it comes from a paper mill and it is an utter and complete BS. What you are learning to do is to go to conferences and see who is actually doing great, breakthrough science and you follow them and their work
I left the academic path just because the pressure and the over hours I used on “writing papers” are just too huge. Nobody is going to read the paper I wrote then why I am putting so much effort with minimum PhD wages. I left and I am glad I made the choice. My salary is 5 times higher now
Did you read other people paper yourself ?
Papers are no longer created to be read, they are created to be counted. The fact that citations, and not its contents, are how a paper is evaluated is the problem.
And that’s why I’m just gonna twitter any new papers 🤷🏽♂️. The ideas need to spread to be talked about and tested not added to and lost in a checklist of the scientist publishing /study industrial complex 😮💨
For what it’s worth I am writing to be read but also know in the current climate no one will read it 😂.
And this is how the Fermi paradox really happens
I'm out of my german university (Technical University Berlin) since 1998 but what you are telling me was already normal back then.
Interesting. I discussed this with my professor, a very senior and respected academic. He says that he built his career 30 years ago, but he is not sure how I could succeed nowadays. He admits that academia has become much more competitive since then, with many more publications, grants, students, etc. Young researchers still have to publish a lot of papers in high-quality journals, but this is no longer a guarantee of a good career and impact.
@@chuscience Famously also Peter Higgs said that he would not have been able to manage in today's academic landscape
@@chuscienceI think things have to do with political climate too. Innovation and science wasn't as good as it now than back then, so your professor was right about him being needed because they're needed to get science to where it is today. On today's climate, I don't think it's impossible. It's up for young people like you to stop whining and just do whatever work needed. Sure, complaining is fun, it made you feel less guilty, however, I'm pretty sure we're aware that in the end, we simply just have to know many things, we need to work on our skills. What skills can you do in research? What are your ideas? If you have decent answer to this, I'm pretty sure you're alright.
@@kw1ksh0t honestly, I don't see the problem.
@@Lifeonthefastlane007 How does it feel to have -110 IQ ?
i am a postdoc in materials, and very similar observations. I feel like a writer more than a scientist sometimes
Go to industry. Nobody will ask you for journal publications there.
Academia really judges your ability to obtain funding and grant-based resources. Academia will promote someone who can get money over someone with skills. Great video. New subscriber.
It promotes someone who can get money over someone who has a lot of papers too.
@@sunway1374 Exactly.
Someone who can get money has been successful in convincing an organisation to fund them, that their research would be valuable.
A very good researcher who's hyper specialised in a very niche interest that nobody sees the value in will of course struggle to get funding.
Funding has to provide some value, simply being good at research isnt providing value.
@@doghat1619 I agree partly with you.
One challenge is we often do not know what will become useful (or valuable) or not.
Also, what is useful or valuable is debatable in general, and debatable under the condition of limited resources.
Increase grant money, problem solved.
Without any interruptions he spoke for 21 minutes, such a talent 👏
Know I start reconsidering my goals in the future. Thank you very much Andrey.
I can remember professors talking about the study decline in the value and importance of papers as the volume has increased about 20 years ago. They also discussed the decline in the quality of teaching that went along with it.
Thank you for sharing you opinions on this sensitive point! The only way to win in Academia is by playing the game, until the game breaks..
At times, even when they're referenced, papers go unread. People simply require material to cite in their papers and may extract a few lines from the abstract without fully grasping the content. My most cited paper has garnered over 2000 citations, but I doubt all those authors have actually read it in its entirety.
Thank you for making this video. You explained the dilemma beautifully. I am in my junior year of undergrad and I had 1 year of experience working in a lab. The dread that I felt over publishing some paper that barely interested me and still required tons of hours of programming, research of other papers, writing the paper, was exhausting. I respect the decision of someone to want to stay in academia, but I will run far, far away from it.
Once I started my PhD it was quite eye-opening to see how many of my colleagues and other academics in my department had parents/grandparents/other family in academia; not to say there's anything wrong with that of course but with the academic landscape as it is it seems that its a lot harder to succeed without pre-existing connections that know how the game works
Stress, prestige, grants, pressure, pay-walls. No to change the world in a meaningful way, you have to have an audience. For long-form content that means blogs.
here is a likely solution: If you hold a position in academia while also working part-time in another field, such as industry, you'll find yourself less reliant on academic metrics. The citation system follows an exponential pattern, where older works gain popularity and significantly contribute to an individual's H-index, explaining around 80% of it.
As a first year PhD student, I relate a lot with what you said in the last comments of the "Publishing pressure" section. The will to be creative and to develop my own identity as a scientist is always trimmed by the pressure to publish in order to advance and achieve "relevant" positions as a scientist.
Once I heard a scientist say that our evalutation of academic and scientific merit should not be a process that a computer could do alone, by merely counting some numbers and parameters. I absolutely agree with that idea, but it seems that without a major change, thing will converge exactly to the point where adimissions to post docs, PhDs and even to permanent positions will be made merely through numbers.
Great video.
Just publish the damn thing.
Hi friend, I feel very identified with your video, it really touched me deeply, I just finished a master in High Voltage, published in IEEE top journals and I have the same feeling as you, what a relief to know that there are people who are experiencing the same as one. I really appreciate your video, it would be great to chat one day.
This is exactly why I quit my Ph.D. I have the utmost sympathy for you and anyone finding themselves in this situation.
Congrats!! I've been under constant publishing pressure and useless reportings since 1st yr, in the 2nd yr I started a job secretly so I safely quit . Now in the 3rd yr I am leaving this hell
Never think you are a bad academic. Your youtube channel is invaluable, as well as your papers. They may not be used right now but in the future they may be very used
This is precisely why I wanted to go into industry despite my love of math. As long as you can create value for your company doing what you love, then you can be as creative and diligent as you would like
You face similar challenges in the industry. The issue with founding is even more accelerated there and your project can be canceled at any time. Everything is about money (your solution has to be cost effective and easy to implement). Also selling your solutions to stakeholders is even more important than in academia
@danimaster6647 I agree to some extent. It's highly position dependent. If I can fulfill everything my employer asks of me and also generate value with my math projects, then, over time, I can spend an increasing amount of time on such math projects. In fact, I can eventually create a new team within the business. If it's all about money and I generate revenue which we otherwise wouldn't generate, then I earn greater freedom to do what I want to. With regards to stakeholders, that depends on the structure of the company. I've never worked somewhere so small or been so senior such that I'm actively interacting with stakeholders to the extent that they are aware of how I spend my time each month
@@nickh7681 I also agree to some extend since it's very true that the more value you create the more freedom you have. With "stakeholder" I meant the person who has an interest in your project and is involved in the founding part. In our company there is politics involved where sometimes great ideas are lost and others (which in my opinion) are dead ends are followed because of the opinion of some board members. The ressources which are allocated is also a matter of politics in our company. This isn't to say working in the industry is a bad joice. Above all you get proper money
mannn this stuff is terrifying. i'm a high schooler with a tentative love of math, but i don't actually know enough math to know exactly where my interests lie or if I'm even good at it, and everything i hear about academia and industry sounds horrific. maybe i should just grab an electrical engineering degree or something instead.
@jacksonsmith2955 If you love math and are good at it, then you have nothing to worry about. Stay humble, work diligently, and don't neglect practical skills like programming, machine learning, data science, etc. Also, don't forget to do the normal career stuff like networking and internships. If you're bright, you'll figure it out. Again, stay humble, be patient, and work diligently
Excellent contribution. I have thousands of citations, but I know people who never did any work, they don't even understand what is in the paper. They find people who put their names on papers and them. Then they turn around and brag that they are great.
So academia is basically about being a social media influencer; it's all about subscribers and likes.
I’m not in academia and not sure how this got recommended - very interesting talk about the nuances of academia and how it works. My professor tried to give me a rough summary of industry vs. academia/ professor when I was thinking about my future, but honestly don’t think I’m smart enough for pure academia - but to your point it seems it can be stressful and hard to become successful in academia and not always to focus on developing the models or whatever the paper itself is about
Specifically the academic field needs as many creative geniuses as you have in 6 years you have discovered all this and this is amazing
Everyone in academia wants their research to have an impact in the real world. Unfortunately impact in real world cannot be measured by citations or impact factor, which academia does.
I once read part of a biology paper outlining a method for determining the area under a curve.
They called it the "Tai method".
It worked by approximating the area as an ever greater sum of tiny rectangles.
I thought it was funny because anyone who's gotten past high school math would simply recognize it as integration.
This was written by PHDs.
Whoa.... That's a terribly-reviewed paper, to say nothing about the paper itself. Sounds like a disreputable journal.
Thank you for your video, very fresh and informative. Felt very honest. You are already contributing - if not in papers (due to the problems you mentioned), at least through this type of videos.
Got off this academia treadmill two years ago and never regretted. All my fancy high impact factor papers mean absolutely nothing outside of academia.
Great videa. It's so good that yoy are sharing your thoughts with the public. Having been going through similar thoughts and challenges myself, I have a few points that helped me grab my hand around this whole paper problem:
-I saw many equations and I think you work on modelling/simulation. In such mathematical fields, much fewer citations are common because people tend less to rely on other people's models. In contrast, in psychology and human sciences, a lot more citations occur because they have to make their points by citing other qualitative arguments. So, 4 citations for a psychology paper published in 2021 is bad but maybe it is not that bad for your paper given the mathematical nature of your field.
- At the end of the day, the number of citations, h-index, etc. do not matter that much. A serious hiring committee often hires experts in your field who read your papers and judge the scientific quality of them.
Thanks for the comment. Indeed, I had a few academic interviews recently and noticed that clever academics avoid suspicious researchers with tons of publications. They would rather invite an adequate person with a team mentality.
The answer is to do soft sciences -- easier to meet quantity over quality criteria
😂😂 I heard some academic discussions that “it is the computer scientists who have spoilt academia. They published a lot, so other researchers had to follow”.
@@chuscience Even in computer sciences, different subareas have drastically different life cycles for publishing a paper. It typically takes 3 months or less to finish a deep learning project while a year or more to finish an operating systems one.
its just the age of the science. more mature fields have longer history of established practices, higher barrier of entry in terms of novel contribution
"Of writing many books, there is no end; and much study wearies the mind." - Solomon. Congratulations, modern academia has re-achieved that point.
As someone who works for a university library, this verse truly made me reevaluate the path I am currently following.
I think there are two main problems to understand this:
1) Everyone can count, but few can read. Too often those people make hiring decisions.
2) Capitalist overproduction: The companies owning the journals extract wealth from the public sphere and they do that by selling papers written by publicly funded researchers. The more papers, the more they can sell. So they then lobby the government to implement policies that maximize their profit. It does not matter that the extreme output of papers does not necessarily translate to good science, as long as the money machine is alive and well.
Thank you for this video dear colleague!
There is definitely a need for change.
Worth part in all of this is that if you want to have a chance to work in academia, not only you need to publish, but also you need to publish in high ranked journals.
if Einstein were to live in this era, he would be the lowest-ranked professor lmaooo
I would be surprised if he finished his PhD, let alone get a tenure
@ColdNavigatorand before that he lived as a delivery driver. Great. He also has no kids, because he never could have been able to afford them. So his bloodline is already dead and our human genome more dominated by imbeciles.
@ColdNavigator This example shows that our current academic system in not suitable for the creative people with unconventional thinking
He wouldn't even be a professor 😔 but let's hope for things to get better than this
@ColdNavigator either way, that sort of approach is a huge risk. I don’t think many would *want* it to be that way for themselves😅
I wish someone told me this before I joined academia!! Well said Dr. Andrey
Imo my main problem with citation count as a metric is mainly two things:
1. if you look at the most cited papers in a field more often than not you will find some overview papers that just summarize prior research at the very top. I mean, yes, those papers are fine and important but without the original research before them they are nothing.
2. Sometimes there's research that is so advanced that only a small handful of other very top notch research groups on earth can make good use of those results even though they might allow for much better results than everything else.
I think its time to start discussing alternatives to the metrics used today, actual material things that we can ask institutions to do, to start to walk away to the horrible state of academia today. I havent tought of alternatives but i would like to see the discussion turning into what should academia be, and how do we get there
I am a PhD student at the second year of course. Generally I don't write comments on social media, nor I expose myself as I'm about to do.
Because of this "publish or perish" mechanism I already lost the opportunity to became a professor in the future. The philosophy of my tutor (and so of the research group I joined) is old style: focus on the application, on the project, on the code, make everything work as best as possible, and finally (after many months or a year sometimes) prepare the paper. In the last months I realised that such philosophy doesn't create succesfull academics nor even professors. When I realised that I felt really bad, because I knew a pretty important door was closing for my future. I'm pretty sure I will not be able to became a professor, and that still bothers me a lot.
Your video has been shocking for me. I suddenly realised that maybe the philosophy of my professor is not that wrong. Ok I have to forget the academic career, but still the knowledge and skills that I'm building are precious and valuable. You video changed my mind and my approach.
Thank you so much
Thanks for sharing your story. You still might be able to get academic positions if you show other things on your CV, for example, various projects you worked on, collaborations with industry, patents, etc. But yeah, it will be difficult. You will be competing with other researchers who have dozens of journal papers. Talk to academics who you know. Maybe they can give you better advice on whether or not to stay in academia. Good luck with your PhD!
@@chuscience Thank you so much for the advices.
You just obtained a new subscriber!
You seem a very professional and capable researcher. Good luck for your career
60 citations in 3 years is amazing. What I found very dishartening when I saw that all the citations I get are just general citations in introduction like [12-24] and mine is 18 😂
True. I also noticed that my papers got cited in that way, which means that they were selected just because of their titles or abstract/figures, without a thoughtful intention to use/develop my work.
@@chuscienceis this the reason why people are so anal about """"good"""" abstracts/conclusions?
Same here. Out of about 30 citations, probably 5 are from my other work and 20 from general sentences. Then i get the researchgate notification "youve been cited!" Go to read said paper, and im like sooo why did they cite me? Just because it says bayesian in the title i guess
I just want to say that it is nice to see someone who cares about using vector images in their papers, it feels like many academics are playing a game of not enough jpeg with their figures.
Thanks for sharing your perspective on this. I have noted the overall quality of papers going down the toilet over the last ten years. Even when the research itself is good, the writing is badly in need of an editor; captions contain typos; figures are poorly designed and sloppy. And your comments suggest why this might be - the incentives at work in academia seem to be producing increasingly sloppy science communication as researchers prioritize quantity over quality.
Bravo. This needs to be discussed more openly within and without academia. The rot set in with the marketisation of universities, meaning only $$ matters. Universities no longer prioritise scholarship. They prioritise $$.
My friend was also in Phd and he said also that he was quite unmotivated writing papers since nobody will read them. He also had problems with supervisor that had problems with his papers.
Good points for such a young researcher. One thing I suggest is to avoid focusing too much on tools. Research is not programming nor visualization.
Growing up until now, I have started to lose my sense of value for academic literature around this era. Given the recent scandals and the system you describe, it's hard to absolutely trust the results of a paper in any field, unless it's something so easily provable that you can even experiment with it in your own house. Generally, I have lost a lot of trust seeing how society itself behaves, and academia was no exception to this epidemic. You can only keep doing what you truly desire, or quit academia entirely and find your own suit in something that values your presence and does not abide to a broken underlying system.
Criticism in academia is warranted, but completely abandoning trust in published research leans me to think that maybe you haven’t spent much time in the research field in order to justifiably have that stance. Did you watch this video at all? You’re referencing scandals as your reasoning for ‘losing value in academia’ while his issue derives from the intense amount of time and effort in order to meet the level of scrutiny for publishing, and the low gratification resulting from that. Peer review isn’t perfect, but your lack of trust only shows that you probably haven’t been involved with the research field at all.
The most ironic thing is that anybody working in academia knows that these problems exist and everybody hates this system,. However, nobody is able to make the first move to change it (because everybody is so busy following the rules of the current system). Thank you for your video and your very clear exposition.
Academia is beholden to the dictate of fiscal capture,
just as theory must work within natural laws.
In this generation of scientists and statisticians,
every knowledge worker must be smarter than a generative pretrained transformer.
I work in the industry and occasionally publish conference papers with PhD students we cooperate with. Our papers are more industrial and engineering oriented. And I’m proud to say our papers do provide valuable insights for industry at least, and we got some follow up query from industrial partners. And in my daily engineering role, I also often search for prior art and read carefully the most relevant papers. Mostly conference papers, almost never journal papers. And I do ignore the only academia oriented papers, because they are too theoretical and no practical engineering implementation mentioned, and of course very often too difficult for me to even read through the formulas in the academic papers, let alone understanding them.
For the papers I coauthored, most of the time I’m responsible for most part of the implementation and validation experiments, and also 70% of the whole draft of the papers. And yes, when I’m writing a paper with a submission deadline, I work till midnight and on weekends.
And when we look for conferences to submit to, we prefer IEEE or ACM as the basic requirements. Then we look at the committee. We’d like to see committee members from the industry, preferably from our customer companies. If the committee consists of only professors, the conference won’t be at the top of our list. And yes, we often got the comment from our professors partners that our paper is not academic enough. But I also want to mention, the professors cooperate with our company, are smart and very knowledgeable people. The professors ask good questions and provide good insights and help us sharpen our research direction and experiment design.
In short, I love working with academias as an engineer in Industry. I guess I won’t be happy in a die hard academic environment. I love engineering and I love to have some good academic guidance for my industrial research. I love writing papers to present my industrial research results.
Thank you for sharing your story! Sounds like a great balance between publishing and implementation.
May I ask you how many papers you write or co-author per year?
Andrey
Very insightful, thank you. I am considering doing a PHD but this made me a realise that perhaps working as a research assistant might be better.
My father is an academia for all his life, he and his boss are still not retired (his boss is in his 90s and still working). From very young age I had experience of father was always working during the day, lab experience in the night, and back to his office during weekend. After I graduated from master, I said No to PHD for this reason. It’s great to see young people are interested in academic work, but to me it means lots of work, less of pay(compare to private) and no time for your family. Good luck to everyone on this journey, hope the future is different.
That's true. I know a few academics who are 70 years old (not 90 - sounds like an extreme case). I cannot understand why one should lead a lab or projects at that age.
Every comment here: I published a paper on how to make our *killer replacement AI robots for Skynet* but nobody read it as everyone else is focused on publishing papers about how to make our *killer replacement AI robots for Skynet* , and I feel underappreciated and lonely.
I don't totally agree with everything said, but I'm glad someone from academia is standing up and willing to discuss these issues cause... They're real issues! We all have and/or keep suffering from these problems and side effects. So I'm happy to see this type of discussion being brought up to light. Thank you for the video.
very interesting perspective I have never thought about research in this way before (don't have any experience yet just a masters student). thanks for making the video and best of luck for your future.
Better not get into this grind while you still have time. When you really have something novel, the motivation to publish will automatically come. Only then you publish. Until then, get an actual job
Thank you for this reality check. I see some researchers in Psychology cope with this by for example dissect the same dataset multiple times, for different research questions each time. I saw one Post Doc publishing about 20 papers a year, all with the same dataset. Its a weird system.
I enjoy listening to your insights into academia
What you were talking about with Ai reminds me of my theory of work emails in the future.
You have one coworker, who puts the main topic of an email into ChatGPT which then creates a nice formal work email, which then gets sent to colleagues. The colleagues then copy/paste this email into ChatGPT, get the summary, then use ChatGPT to write their own reply emails... which the original coworker then puts into ChatGPT to get the summary.
I wonder if this will happen. Data and intentions fed to ChatGPT and papers published using this Ai help, just for another individual to feed ChatGPT the full formal paper and get the summary.
I call it Balloon Theory. What you want is the material, but it's just filled with Ai(r)
Obviously an alternative to papers is needed, so that focus is removed from the paper publishing. I would suggest a new format is needed. One example is large scale collaboration such as the IPCC reports. The scientists will not be measured for their individual contributions in the form of a finished paper, but will be judged for the overall work.
The impact of the article is mainly personal. This is why most people don't care about citations. Why did you start the article in the first place? Was it to make an impact on others or on yourself? Research is a mix of personal fulfillment and impact on others. We aim to convince others that our research is good enough to be published. Once completed, one day people will be interested in your research. That's why we do collaborations. The problem is not in the declining values, but just in the metrics. People are more concerned about publishing than getting something relevant for themselves.
I know exactly where you're coming from. I spent 45+ years teaching---secondary school through doctoral levels---and I, too, published my share of academic papers. Long ago I realized the emptiness
and futility of this publishing cycle. And in all the years of all these academics publishing so-called learned papers, not a one has found a cure for cancer, let alone the common cold. Now that I'm out of academia, I sit back and think, "All these papers----no more than glorified BS and fluff & puff."
Hey flexibleflyer50, where will the people who like science go instead ? Conducting their own research independently ? It all seem so bleak. I don't know what waters I'm dipping my toe in.
In my context :
I'm a nursing student in France and it is required of us to publish ≈30 pages to be certified (among other things) at the end of the last year (3 years in total).
P.S. : I'm not looking for a lazy way to circumvent it (although it is becoming a sadly common practice to plagiarise from a machine/human).
I've tried picking the best terms to explain my perspective.
Hope you're having a good day,
AAAHHHHAHHAHHAAH
@@aaahhhhahhahh I've had many colleagues who left the academic grind, opened their own businesses, or went to work for companies. Options are out there.
One chemist began her own business right in the house----creating flavors for food products and then scents for a line of bath products. She now has a thriving business.
Hi. If you haven't worked in experimental biology I could explain why there probably won't ever be a single cure for cancer (and coming up with a useful new treatment for any one form is monstrously hard) - and why curing the common cold isn't one of those easy little problems like sending a spacecraft to Mars.
People aren't fooling around out there. All best.
I left academia in Germany, because once I spent 5 years in it I saw how rotten it was. Supervisor professor that sneaks as coauthor in every paper without major contribution, use of dependent variables that can produce results even when results are not there, corruption among reviewers and supervisor, that know one another and push one another's papers, replication of major studies with very fine changes and shamelessly claiming that is totally new concept etc etc.
All points that you mention are true.
One video was sufficient, now I know I don't want to pursue in research after my PhD
I did my PhD and postdoc in biomedical sciences in the US. My observation was similar to yours and I don’t want to go back to academia. But finding a job in the industry is very tough right now. All the best for your future endeavors.
Very interesting video! I agree with what you say. The measurements have become the objectives
Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Thanks for this video. As someone finishing a PhD in chemistry, I was interested in academia when I started, but I'm now looking at exclusively jobs in industry because I am so tired of the publish or perish climate in academia with so many good papers that go unread because everyone is focusing on their own work. My third paper was just accepted for publication, and it's the one I'm most proud of. Even if it gets relatively ignored, I'm happy about the insights that I was able to contribute in it.
Wow! Who could have known trying to force fundamental research into a profit system could have downsides.
All non for profit systems are for the profit of the upper echelons, given enough time.
In academics, your CV is your "employment insurance." If you have many high quality publications, you are unlikely to be fired, and if fired, you will be able to find employment elsewhere. However, few and poor quality publications, means you could lose your job, and finding another job will be difficult. Grant funding is also important.
You seem to have opened your eyes on the old paradigm: "publish or perish". The issues that you discuss have been known to poison academia for decades. Bureaucrats lead academia and academics let them do that. Note that among bureaucrats you have a bunch of low-level scientists who managed to stay in academia and make the life of good scientists a nightmare. What you call "successful professors" are those who, for some reason, enjoy the benefits of a large network. Together with the volume of publications, the volume of coauthors should be considered to better see that "successful authors" are those who make tiny scientific contributions in papers. They "supervise" the work, which means they get the grants and pay PhD students and postdocs to do the real scientific work: research. Best of luck to you.
I am an auto-didact, coming from an agricultural background, my work is in neuro-symbol networks. Point is, I've been on a team working together on an open-source Arcology project. My colleagues are academics, and I must say it is baffling. I work to make the best system I can, I want my work to be good and solid, trying to make the systems I would want to use in the field. My work I release public domain, seems to me that make sense as impact is my value. I have found this is completely different from their perspective. They seem to see academia and the journals as literally "science". As if the institution itself is science, not just a system build around it. The focus seems to be on funding and getting grants, constantly talking about grants, it is tiresome. They have plans for papers, and a journal, and etc. Like you say in the video, paper publishing and grant acquisition seem the highest priorities. The continued propagation of the institution seems to be the priority of those who are trained by the institution.