Declining Value of Papers in Academia

hi my name is Andre I'm research associate at the University of Manchester and in this video I want to discuss the value of papers in Academia why I think that this value is declining and what are the problems and implications for scientists nowadays especially for young researchers like me and in this video I want to share with you my personal experience show some interesting examples and insights and I hope that these ideas will be useful for you especially if you're a PhD student or you're just thinking to join this academic path okay let's start so I'm not working as a postdoc for about two years and before that I was doing my PhD at skull Tech Moscow uh for four years so in total I'm working in Academia for about six years and during these six years my understanding of the value of academic papers was constantly changing and unfortunately today it seems to me that the following rule the following principle Works in Academia and we can write it like this your career equals your papers and yeah I put a small asterisk here because it is not always the case sometimes your personal relationship your networking is more important maybe some of your hard skills play a role but let's say in 90 of the cases your career literally equals your papers and if you do not believe me let me show you just one very recent example uh recently I was applying for a promotion at the University of Manchester and when you apply for a promotion you need to submit certain documents to your department it is like your CV some other documents and uh field form which is in my case called individual statement for promotion I don't think I can share the entire form with you but what I want to show you is a screenshot of how this form begins so one of the first things that you are asked when applying for promotion is this small table which is called Journal paper citation statistics and you should indicate since your last promotion or in the last five years what are your citations what citations did you achieve and according to different databases like Web of Knowledge scopus and Google Scholar so as I said one of the first things asked in this promotion statement and honestly I find this a little bit offensive because this document doesn't ask you anything about your skills about your journey in research it it is asking you about research later but first thing is number of papers and number of citations but yeah what about my skills what about my my unique experience what if I have some absolutely crazy skills in visualizing large datasets in Python no one asks you about this for promotion what is asked here is number of citations and number of papers and then I found another document about promotions in the University which is called academic promotions criteria again this is a document with many many bullet points but I just want to show you how this document starts the the two main points here which are an emergent record of output high quality peer-reviewed research Publications which means how many paper you have and second success in obtaining external research funding which means how many research grants and findings you have and again this shows that no matter how interesting your research and your ideas are you will not be promoted without these indicators without citations papers and grants and this is the reality that I don't like about Academia and these are the problems and the consequences that I want to discuss in this video so this example this case with the promotion application helps me to realize that your academic career literally depends on your paper sensitions but then when starts thinking and working on papers I found really strange things counter-intuitive things that I want to discuss with you and I want to start with this topic that the importance of a single Paper of a single publication can be very very low and again I want to share my personal experience I think a very indicative case study here I published a very good Journal paper two years ago in a top tier journal in Power Systems research this journal is very famous it's called transactions on Power Systems and to give you an idea of how tough this journal is only about 20 percent of all submissions get accepted like think about this out of 10 papers only two papers get accepted very rigorous and tough Journal okay top level journal and I was working on this paper for about a year and then during the revision process I was very nervous I was double checking triple checking each paragraph of my paper to make it very concise and very clear for readers and for reviewers because I wanted to make an impact and even with the figures in this paper I was spending days and days just to make them beautiful as you might see here they're plotted in 3D and I was trying to make them beautiful transfer them in this Vector scalable format so readers and reviewers can zoom in if needed and explore the solutions the data that I present here and again my my main goal here was to make this paper useful and to bring some impact and now I realized that two years have passed and I can see what is happening with this paper and we can check what is the impact of this paper we can go to my Google Scholar account and see how many times it was cited since then so what we see here is that for the last two years it was cited only four times which is not that much but this is not the main problem I was thinking when preparing for this video what is the impact that this paper made what can I name as the impact and I don't really feel any impact I don't really see any feedback from this paper I mean there were no discussions about this interesting model that I presented no one came to me no one wrote me an email no one ever tried to discuss with me this paper even though I think it's very novel and it is published in a top tier journal in Power Systems research so what happens in other journals in bad journals what happens with some unknown conferences the your publication can literally get zero citations in several years and no one will read it so I think it's a big problem in Academia nowadays and I think I had a lot of Illusions about academic career when I was younger I was reading some stories about Einstein or Stephen Hawking I I like the story that some Russian professors were translating papers by Stephen Hawking in Russian And discussing them in Soviet Union you know there was this constant scientific discussion of some new things and I'm not comparing myself to Stephen Hawking of course but I want to see at least tiny impact from our Publications and I don't quite see it and this is a little bit disappointing and probably academics who are working many years here they are already used to this problem and they don't care that much if one of their papers doesn't get many citations uh but I do I do care and as I said I want to see at least tiny impact from every work that I publish okay so these eventually creates a huge publishing pressure on students on postdocs and we see from this example that it is not enough to publish interesting paper it is not enough to publish paper in good journals you need to publish a lot of papers and when I say a lot I mean really a lot of papers but what is the rule here how many papers should you publish to stay in Academia and I think this rule exists this is what my colleagues my manager told me and the rule sounds like this one Journal paper and one conference paper per year is the minimum and if you think about this it sounds quite quite doable just two papers per year I I don't say that this is easy by the way sometimes it's very hard to publish two papers per year but it is doable okay but what I want to notice here is this word minimum that this is the minimum if you want to stay in Academia but what if you want to become a good researcher what if you want to succeed in Academia then you need to multiply these values by three or four publish eight papers per year and this will be impressive but you will not impress anyone saying that yeah I published this one single Paper per year this is not good anymore in this way publishing papers becomes the main incentive and the main requirement in Academia and I was thinking about this that everyone I know is constantly working on papers every day again some simple examples sometimes when I have a break I'm walking here in our department in the open space and I see screens of people working sometimes they just look what are they doing and I see that they're working on papers I see latex or word editors open and they're typing something all the time which means that every researcher here probably is sitting and working on papers every day and not only in Manchester but in all other universities and you can imagine the amount of paper produced and the amount of energy and work spent on this so the problem that this creates throughout my career so far I met really tired exhausted people because of this publishing pressure again from my experience last year I had a situation where I had a deadline I had to submit a paper for conference in about two weeks so I had a two-week deadline on the top of that I was working on another paper and on the top of that I have a project where I I should be coding in Python developing some models so what's the problem here the problem is that if working in a normal environment let's say in some company I can say that the models are more important this is something real they are needed this python code might be useful let's postpone the papers and let's focus on the code for the next few months and only then come back to the papers but this would be harmful to my academic career and that would be bad for my co-authors therefore the advice that I got is to focus on papers above anything else and yeah this is another principle that I want to discuss here today work on papers above anything else and I don't quite like this principle because it creates a lot of bad consequences let me list a few here so first it's obvious it's quality of work suffers quality of projects is sacrificed as I said when your main goal becomes just publishing papers two minimum periods maybe more you start dedicating a big chunk of your time just for papers and not for projects which means not for improving the quality of experiments models whatever you're more and more focused on papers and the next Point here is work on weekends unfortunately uh many people work on weekends in Academia I myself last year was working many weekends and you can do nothing about this because if you have a deadline for your conference paper or a journal paper it is your own problem and you cannot even complain about this you know that either you work this weekend and then you submit the paper or you just start failing in Academia and yeah your career suffers and the last point I think which is very interesting and not really discussed is creativity because when you are pushed to publish that much and that often you have to use your current knowledge and current model and you try to squeeze maximum out of what you have now if you have some model you improve it a little bit with some minimum contribution and you try to publish one paper maybe two papers that would be great right but you don't really think out of the box like I want to apply this new method I want to completely shift the topic I want to get new figures you you don't have energy inspiration creativity for this you don't have yeah energy to create new things you start working on something that you know well to get more and more results more and more papers and I think this is really a bad consequences of this academic publishing pressure all right so we discussed that papers are very important a single paper is not that important and we need to publish them a lot uh minimum two per year this seems to be the rule uh but my next question is how many should we publish to become really good researchers really well established professors and to get the answer for this question we can check just any successful professor in your field I don't want to mention any names in Power System research but the usual plots the usual figure for such successful professors looks like this we see a huge growth in citations and nowadays this person gets about two three thousand citations new citations per year in total I think such professors have like 20 or 30 000 citations and this is just ridiculous because I don't know how is it possible to get that many citations and there is an answer again we can just open the all of their public applications and start counting how many papers they publish per year and what I found in my field is that successful professors publish 20 25 30 papers per year and again this is unrealistic it is impossible to write or even read these 25 papers per year which means that this is not a person publishing these papers but there is a public there is a publishing machine uh he has a lot of co-authors all of his PhD students postdocs working together citing each other including each other as co-authors and yeah we are dealing here with a huge publishing machine and the problem here is that if you open a Google Scholar account of young researchers let's consider myself in this case you will see a figure like this of course we see some growth and the growing Trend but in total I have so far in the first five years 60 citations which is much much lower than it should be to be considered as a successful academic and this instant comparison available by services like Google Scholar it also creates a wrong working environment for academics I think this comparison is a little bit depressing and discouraging because you can find people who are just three maybe five years older than you but they're 500 times more productive than you I mean literally the number of their citations is 500 times more than yours and you can do nothing about this you you should work 10 or 20 more years to get to that level and all of these leads to the next problem that we have more and more papers published I mean young researchers are publishing papers bad researchers publishing papers and successful researchers publishing papers even more successfully even more of them and all of these eventually decreases the value of papers and there are some other factors that I want to briefly mention like the number of growing journals we have new predatory journals Open Access journals that are publishing your work for a fee and such journals usually say that they have good quality control but usually they do not and might it is it is generally much easier to publish with them uh such journalists except to work with some incremental minimal contributions and as we discussed in the beginning the academic system rewards you for publishing more papers uh which means that you will go to these Open Access journals to publish even more of them and finally we have some new AI tools available like chat GPT such tools in the future will uh enable people to publish papers with within several days maybe even one day and this will create even more papers and again their their impacts their value will decline so I see a huge Paradox here that the value of papers is constantly declining decreasing but at the same time we need to publish even more of them and this doesn't make sense if you think about this if something is losing its value why should you be spending more time and energy to get it imagine if we are in a financial Market there will be a huge crisis with this bubble of papers of many papers that are not cited not needed but we are not in the financial market and it seems that academics don't care about this so much maybe they simply don't have time to care about these rules but what if we just stop and think is it really worth it is it really worth spending a big part of your career of your life to finally get this level of 100 papers and few thousand citations on Google Scholar I don't know but this bothers me and I think this is a huge problem in Academia right now and moreover I saw many people some of my colleagues living Academia because they don't like this publishing pressure they don't like writing papers every week and maybe even every day because they have passion in something else like experiments Theory maybe coding and Publishing is generally boring for them and therefore eventually they have to leave Academia and again I think this is a problem that we are dealing with right now so some final thoughts that I have to say about the importance of papers I want to mention the relative importance of papers again we have senior colleagues professors who publish 20 25 papers per year and if one of these Journal papers gets rejected or pending somehow it is not a big deal for them but for me a young researcher this is the question of life and death because as we discussed I need this one minimal paper per year to be published and I work really hard I work on weekends and if this paper gets rejected in a journal I quickly fix it resubmit to another journal and hope that it will be finally accepted so I get at least a few Publications per year and at the same time you open Google Scholar again and you see that some of your senior colleagues add 20 items to their account that year and again I don't believe that this creates a good working environment especially for young researchers so the question is what to do about this and I have several points to mention maybe a bit of advice for you the first one is a funny one I want to say that you have to love writing papers and if you do not love writing papers you should learn how to love writing papers and at least you should prepare yourself that in the future you will be learning how to love writing papers because without this skill it is simply impossible to stay in Academia and work here for many years the next point is quite obvious but very useful it is actively search for collaborations and this is what most of the successful professors do they collaborate with each other they discuss some interesting topics and I I myself start playing this game I write a draft of a manuscript and then I invite a few people and they agree to become my co-authors and then in the future maybe they will invite me as a co-author so this is a very effective and legal tool to Simply multiply your citations and multiply your papers so if you want to succeed in Academia this is the way to go you should communicate with people and you should discuss when and what to publish together to increase your number of papers and the third uh bullet point is less obvious but I want to say here that you should try to collect some other achievements for your resume for your CV what I mean by this that it is very hard to play this paper publishing game so what we can do we can collect other achievements like joining small research projects maybe some small Consulting projects again I recommend you to talk with your advisor with your manager or professor and ask other any other small projects or Consulting works and again maybe you will not get any money from that maybe you will contribute just a little bit but in the end you will be able to mention in your CV that you have a few papers and also experience in a few projects and this is very beneficial for your academic career so again summing up um I hope that the situation could change in the future again maybe because of these AI tools like chat GPT every researcher in the future will have at least 100 Publications and what to do next like where is Academia moving do we want to say that each researcher should publish like a million papers I don't think this makes a lot of sense so I think the rules will have to change eventually maybe there will be some interesting restrictions like professors cannot publish more than 5 or 10 papers per year and only uh interesting ideas would matter that unfortunately this is not the case yet and young researchers like me have to adapt to the system and have to play this publishing game so I hope that this video and these examples that I shared will be useful for you and let me know in the comments if you have any topics any relevant problems that I overlooked and yeah good luck with your papers have a nice day bye

Channel: ChuScience

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Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023