Great thought takes great time. My daily blog attests.
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So, why do it? Why come up with a mostly original thought? Research it? Test the thesis? Write it all down in a very structured way? Submit it to a journal? Review feedback? Make changes? And, finally, push to have it accepted for publication?
Intellectual curiosity. Fame. Glory. Advancing science. Saving lives. And,… tenure. If you want academic standing and advancement, you better get published. To become old academics, young academics need to put their names on smart stuff. Or, at least, stuff.
To me, this is sort of perverse. Call this my Rolling Stones theory. There are an endless number of one-hit wonders out there. From that guy to the whosiwhatsits. But there are very few Rolling Stones. A band that can generate songs — some of them almost listenable — after being around for decades. That’s because it’s much easier to have one good idea, one time.
The chart for musical hittedness should and mostly does look like a line that starts way up on the top, left and heads straight down the bottom, right.
The chart for academic publishing should be the opposite. Having a novel, brilliant, publishable insight on something isn’t going to come easily to people just entering a field. Ideas that they think are brilliant have, often, been discovered, covered, and, in some cases, dismissed. At the very least, they’ve published and bandied about.
Youth is not a winning criteria in academic publishing. Which explains why Havard Professor of Medicine and cardiovascular innovator, Chirstopher Cannon, MD has authored or co-authored 1,011 peer-reviewed papers. He’s been at the top of his field for decades. Knows everything. And he has the incredible intellect to connect dots to come up with new dots.
Last year, people wrote 1.7 million papers about medicine that were published in peer-reviewed journals. 1,690,679 to be exact. If that seems like a lot… it is.
This process can take months. I know people who are trying to streamline this archaic process. Speed it up. Mo’ papers, mo’ tenure.
Who would want to slow progress?
Well, for one, Jason Thatcher, PhD. A guy who’s been teaching in many hallowed halls since 2002. He said twenty years ago, a “good” early-career scholar had published one or two papers to get tenure. Now, that person may need to publish up to six papers.
Thatcher says mo’ papers just leads to mo’ noise. People just repackage the old findings to slap their name on a new paper. Makes sense, I think I owned 14 Smith CDs with Hatful of Hollow on it. Johnny Marr says he can’t replicate the unmistakenly identifiable static opening noise. But the Smith’s record labels sure knew how to sell reproduce the song.
The hits keep coming. Mo’ speed means mo’ mistakes. Elisabeth Bik, PhD googled a line from a microbiology paper she wrote. Three identical results popped out. She started looking for fraud in academic literature.
It takes time to test each line from a paper to see if it’s been duped. So far, she’s tested 20,000 papers. Papers that have gone through peer review before being published should be clean. I mean, that’s the point. She found 800 errors or cases of fraud. About half have been corrected. Four percent doesn’t seem like a big deal. But, when you multiple it by two million, it’s a big number. 67,627 to be exact. If that seems like a lot… it is.
Two days later, one of the leading academic publishers — Wiley — shut down 19 of their journals due to, “A massive influx of fake papers.” In the past two years that retracted 11,000 “compromised” papers. Ouch.
The journals were all published by Hindawi. Wiley paid $300m in 2021 to buy Hindawi’s 250 journals. Ouch again. I hope Wiley got some money back.
Wiley makes its money being the official publisher for a society and by selling access to their papers to individuals and libraries. They’re part of the $30B academic publishing industry. Hindawi had a different model. For a fee, they move authors to the front of the queue.
Paper mills abused this large loophole. They’d write some paper. Right. Wrong. No matter. They’d sell the naming rights to it the way the city of Chicago takes money from taxpayers to build a stadium, gives it to the Bears, and Bears sell the naming rights to a big Chicago company. A want-to-be-tenured academic under pressure to publish, would pay to put their name on top. The mills would seek out journals or special editions with weak peer review.
What could go wrong?
Everything. Sticky fingers in a $30B pie.