Publish Or Perish

Type: Academic Organizational

Problem: To ensure that professors hired by a college or university are producing high-quality research

Context: Evaluation of professors

Forces: Difficult to identify the quality of an academic work; especially without years of hindsight. (Many papers nowadays considered classics weren't instantly recognized as such--often times the best papers are ones which were controversial at publication.)

Supposed Solution: Demand that professors publish a certain amount of papers in peer-reviewed journals. Use peer-review and refereeing process as a way of filtering out "bad" papers. Often times, papers published in other media (conference proceedings, online, etc.) don't count, regardless of the quality of the underlying research.

Resulting Context: Lots of papers published that contain trivial research. (Peer-review is useful at checking the consistency of the research and the soundness of the methodology, and as an editing/revision process, but less so at determining whether or not research is significant). Publication becomes an end in itself, rather than a means towards furthering scientific progress. Many journals demand surrender of copyright on papers that are published; essentially imposing a toll on the knowledge contained therein (subscribing to most academic journals is very expensive, a major university may pay millions per year in royalties/subscription fees). Teaching and other academic duties may be neglected. In some extreme cases, trivial research (that can be quickly turned into papers) is undertaken, rather than potentially ground-breaking research that might require years before becoming publication-worthy.

Design Rationale: Peer review is deemed by some to filter out "junk" papers; it is easy for college administrators to determine the number of papers published.

ReFactored Solution: Several have been proposed: 1) Accept papers published in non-traditional media (including the prof's web page). 2) Consider the number of times the paper is cited as a criteria (though this may take some time to become useful).

The first of these refactored solutions is obviously unacceptable, since it dispenses with peer review as a quality control mechanism. The second is simply a variation on standard publish or perish - partly amounting to "publish in highly visible, and therefore more frequently cited, journals or perish". This could be seen as a viable means of obtaining further quality control above peer review; it depends on whether one equates the impact factor of the journal with the quality of the papers in it, which is not a given. High-profile journals have an incentive to publish controversial papers of less than stellar quality, both because these papers tend to grab headlines and because papers containing dubious results tend to generate more follow-up papers correcting the results - thus generating more citations and a higher impact factor for the journal.

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Examples in the Literature: Tons. Literally. :)

Examples in Practice:

For what it's worth, for promotion/tenure the quality of work you publish as a research science professor is not nearly as important as the quantity of money you bring in with research grants. Most granting agencies award grants largely on the basis of published work history (as well as original preliminary data) which makes papers useful, but the actual academic success score is denominated in dollars. For post-doctoral researchers (post-docs), publish or perish is much more true as their prospects for promotion/advancement is much more directly related to their research papers.

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