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Elite Group of Researchers Rule Scientific Publishing
sciencehabit writes Publishing is one of the most ballyhooed metrics of scientific careers, and every researcher hates to have a gap in that part of his or her CV. Here's some consolation: A new study finds that very few scientists—fewer than 1%—manage to publish a paper every year. But these 150,608 scientists dominate the research journals, having their names on 41% of all papers. Among the most highly cited work, this elite group can be found among the co-authors of 87% of papers. Students, meanwhile, may spend years on research that yields only one or a few papers. "[I]n these cases, the research system may be exploiting the work of millions of young scientists," the authors conclude.
...and a negative one at that.
Could it ever possibly be that these scientists who "dominate" the scientific publishing are actually worthy of such a thing?
Indeed. And besides, compared to the star system in Hollywood, for example, this is downright democratic.
The intellectual penury that comes with serving with a leader in a given field seems to be gladly endured by most young researchers. This story ignores the fact that, although the senior researcher's name may be at the top of the paper, the junior researcher's name is right there below it.
It's a bit like an actor accepting a lesser credit in order to appear in a bigger film.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
All that stuff in science textbooks has been the consensus of scientists for years. How else are you going to decide what to put in a textbook beside consensus? Just put in your textbook things you would like to believe are true?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
1% Elitism is EVERYWHERE.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The intellectual penury that comes with serving with a leader in a given field seems to be gladly endured by most young researchers. This story ignores the fact that, although the senior researcher's name may be at the top of the paper, the junior researcher's name is right there below it.
Actually, in many of the sciences (mathematics and parts of physics are notable exceptions, where authors tend to be listed alphabetically) it is usually the graduate student or postdoc who did most of the work who is the first author on the paper. The senior researcher - a principal investigator who actually has the academic appointment, who may have secured the funding, and who is ultimately responsible for the lab - is generally listed as the last author on the manuscript. ("Middle" authorship has the least cachet by far.)
Broadly speaking, young scientists and trainees want to accumulate as many first-author papers as possible, to demonstrate their scientific productivity. Faculty members - senior scientists - want to accumulate last-author papers, to demonstrate that their labs are productive.
~Idarubicin
Why? It would take only one scientist to falsify AGW. All we need now is the evidence.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Junior guys in [field] aren't as well known as senior guys and do most of the grunt work.
Film at 11.
Yep, and no matter what you think of Edison, the modern research lab was primarily his invention. A modern lab tends to know what it is looking for (eg: practical light bulb) and is all about the finding the steps to get there (trial and error), compared to say Newton who mainly followed his own curiosity. The trick to being a lead researcher is finding a rich problem space for the students to work on that will attract grants.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What's the problem with being good at what you do? So there are 1% of researchers who are really fucking good at what they do. They aren't just good, they are REALLY FUCKING GOOD. They are top 1% good. They are THE BEST IN THE WORLD. So why should we be surprised that they have such an impact?
They are getting 99% of the academic tail, too.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I would even argue that as long as the students who did most of the work have their name listed as first author, there is nothing wrong with this arrangement. I dropped out of my master's program after the first semester because I was being pushed to publish, but wasn't being plugged into any research existing programs. Every "unique" idea that I thought of turned out to have already been studied exhaustively back in the 70's or earlier. All the favorite students in the grad program were people who ignored this inconvientent fact and managed to get rehashed bullshit accepted into conferences.
Several years later I went back to school at a large state U that plugged me into the work they were doing, showed me what the state of the art was and where there were gaps that hadn't been researched in detail. Without building off the ideas of my advisor I would have never been able to do meaningfull research that progressed the state of the art, and would have had nothing worth publishing. He deserved to have his name on my papers.
Because they are not doing the best work. Often they are not doing any of the work, they simply have brand value.
They took a publications database between 1996 and 2011, which contains about 15,000,000 authors.
There they found only 150,000 published every of those years.
Of course not all of those 15 million have been working in research for 16 years. Most graduate/PhD students are in research for 5 years and then they need to find another job.
Actually most people at my company were author or co-author of a paper at some point, and we only published because of some grants that required it.
So if you take out the people who really only have a couple of publications, or published for a small period of time, the picture will be completely different.
Take into account that you need people who's career actually span the 1996-2011 period (which filters out probably like 30% of people genuinely having a successfull academic career), and they actually paint a realistic picture of who the profs are or research leads.
I'm surprised the "dominating group" is that large. There aren't a ton of _senior_ scientist out there (i.e. professors or researchers with the funding for graduate students and postdocs), and those are the people whose names appear most frequently. A senior scientist will probably have been doing research for years, have lots of projects going on at once, have many students and postdocs, have a number of collaborators, and the senior scientist's name will go on every paper produced by that group (even if it's as a middle author -- which means next to nothing). New guys will often want to collaborate with the big names, which means the big names get on even more papers. If you're working on your own (i.e. you don't have the funding to hire others), then you won't publish as frequently.
What did you expect? Why is this an issue?
Sincerely,
A graduate student who has been working on a project for two years (and who should be working on a paper)
Given how relatively time-consuming research is(and how negative results, however valid, tend to have difficulty moving papers), it would be...surprising... to hear that one percent of the scientists are co-authoring 41 percent of the papers on sheer productivity.
Actually, not so surprising, depending on how the analysis is done. And it also depends a lot on how you want to measure "sheer productivity". A supervisor who helps design the experiment, interpret the data, write the paper, and communicate with journal editors probably spends fewer hours than the trainee (grad student or postdoc) who actually does all the bench work--but that doesn't mean that the supervisor hasn't earned an authorship credit.
If Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, and Elsa are all graduate students in Dr. Frink's lab, and each of those students publishes two papers over the course of their PhD programs, then all of those students are going to be authors on 2 papers each, and Frink will be an author on 10 papers. Dr. Frink is 1 out of 6 scientists - a bit less than 17% - but is on 100% of the papers. If you have a big lab in a relatively hot (or well-funded) field, then your name is going to be on a lot of papers.
And papers these days - especially the high-impact, widely-read, highly-cited papers - tend to have a longer list of authors. If you look at the table of contents for the most recent issue of Science, the two Research Articles have 26 and 12 authors. Out of the dozen or so Reports, one has 4 authors, two have 5, all the rest have more. Speaking personally and anecdotally, my last three manuscripts (in the biomedical sciences) had 8, 3, and 7 authors.
Going back to "1% of scientists are on 45% of papers"--well, if those are all six-author papers, then that top 1% is only responsible for a 7.5% share (45 divided by 6) of the "output". Given that there is a very long tail of authors who only have 1, 2, or 3 authorships in their lifetime (the majority of PhD graduates never end up conducting research as university faculty; there just aren't enough jobs), I am willing to believe that there is a small fraction of productive, top scientists whose names are on a disproportionately large share of papers.
~Idarubicin
Knowing that you could be putting in 70-80 hours a week, and potentially stumble across some major discovery (imagine: cure a kind of cancer discovery). That discovery would be published by your boss, who, adding to his life's work, would cumulatively take most of the public credit for the work. Meanwhile, it doesn't matter if you had some amazing insight or designed the actual experiment to solve the problem.
Look at Nobel laureates and their age and their contributions. How many nameless people enabled them to win that award?
All you can hope for is that you publish a couple papers in top journals that will enable to you to get a solid job in industry, or jump onto the tenure track treadmill, so that one day you can be in a position of exploiting others' work and creativity, potentially in a field completely unrelated to your PhD.
The young have no power to change, and the old have no reason to give up their advantageous position.
99% of review committees for conferences and editorial boards on journals are made up of that 1% of elite scientists. So the guys who decide which papers get published and which get crumpled and tossed into the bin are from the one who, by the way, do most of the publishing.
Having been in research for 15+ years, everyone knows that it's one big collusion of people promoting each other and excluding the rest. *Everyone* knows this. If a researcher pretends not to understand this or dismisses it then he's bullshitting you. Yes. It is depressing. Oh, and while I was actively publishing I was in the 1%...
I just did some googling and it seems here in the UK a full time gabage collector would make about £12K per year (though it's paid hourly and in practice it may be difficult to find full time work).
I'm just about to start a postdoc position on just under £30K per year.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Wasn't this the point of cosmos? to get more of these exploitable kids into the system?
Because it's almost literally impossible for someone to actually put in all of the work required to publish hundreds of papers during their career. A paper might typically take six months of gruelling, full-time work. Instead of actually doing the work, what a lot of scientists do is they bring in a lot of students and act as project supervisors, as it says in the article: "Many of these prolific scientists are likely the heads of laboratories or research groups; they bring in funding, supervise research, and add their names to the numerous papers that result." In other words, they drop in for maybe half an hour every two weeks or so to get an 'update' (without really understanding anything), throw around some bs pieces of 'advice' (which everyone ignores) and then leave.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
you talk as if the problem in TFA is a funding issue...
there needs to be more public funding of research for sure, and bigger budgets for state universities...yes all true
however, you're giving these professors in TFA a free pass and blameshifting
TFA is about **THE TOP PUBLISHERS** not just the highest PhD in each department...
to call this a funding issue is to miss the root cause: the professors themselves
it's out of control in academia...really it is become awful...narcissistic tenured prof's staying on 20 years past when they should have retired to make room for new younger talent
Thank you Dave Raggett
I (BSc) was assisting a PhD student on a project, a project the student was having difficulty with and became very demotivated. Although his supervisor was doing all he could to keep the research going (including bringing me onboard to help), eventually the PhD candidate pulled out. The end result, a paper has been published with my name and his supervisor's name on it, because we ended up finishing the study. So yeah, I can see how his supervisor having yet another paper with his name on it published might seem like the 1%, but reality is, the supervisor had the work ethic to finish off the study and have it published when the student did not.
Having a good supervisor is extremely important. The arrangement where your supervisor is a person who is knowledgable, up-to-date, and respected in their field, and draws on his years of experience to guide your through work and train you as a scientist, is the ideal on which the supervisor-student relationship is based on. A person like that more than deserves to have their name on the work you do while under their tutelage.
But going by what I've seen, such a relationship is, sadly, rare. A lot of students are victims of supervisors who either "don't care" or have been effectively outside their field of study for so long (with all the grant-writing) that they have simply no clue about research anymore. Your first experience seems to be the norm.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I had a conversation about this with a guy at work 2 days before this article was posted. With the professor I had this was not the case, however some of the other professors at my school had this kind of attitude. Most professors\scientists write grants and spend most of their time doing that and the students do most of the work, as long as the students get credit on the paper for it and get paid (cash or stipend), it doesn't matter. If your a student and not getting paid, find something else to do. I have a problem with academics because it seems like its becoming more of a dog and pony show, when it should be doing research that benefits society Some of the scientists don't even review the paper and have their buddies slap there name on it, they get credit for something that they didn't do. People more and more these days want to get something and not do the work. Finance people want to get money regardless of the means or if their investing in actual companies. Scientists want to be recognized for work they didn't do. Even the guy at the local fast food joint wants better pay without getting a better education and\or a better job. Don't even get me started on politicians...
The trick to being a lead researcher is finding a rich problem space for the students to work on that will attract grants.
This is likely to also result in all sorts of politics being attached to getting funding. At best only a subset of possible research areas, which happen to be PC, will get funding. At worst getting the "wrong" results means it then becomes even more difficult to attract grants.
Such a situation can easily lead to "research" which is either poor, even pseudo, science. Since there can be a lot more money in attempts at confirmation than attempts at falsification.
Some economists at Harvard got busted publishing fake crap that support hokey rightwing anti-tax ideology and nothing happened, they just said "oops, gosh, we just made a mistake using Excel" and it blew over. The lamest part is it was published in a supposedly peer reviewed journal yet their fraud was only exposed by an undergrad a public university.
:)
Most likely "peer reviewers" only checked that the paper is consistent with "economics" (or whatever the specific "science" in question is). How often do they look for errors with mathematics or logic? No doubt such reviewers also tend to assume things like measuring instruments, software packages, etc being used correctly and that things which depend on another science havn't been misinterpreted/misunderstood.
Also this case appears to be a "genuine mistake". Whereas with actual fraud you'd expect at least some attempt at obsucation.
I have a lot of respect for physical sciences but these "human sciences" like economics and psychology are full of shit.
Those possibly arn't even the best examples. This sort of thing even has a specific term in the field of medical research
Grant money is given preferably to teams that already publish a lot. Even "starting grants" in the EU require a single principal investigator (PI) with a lot of well-cited publication under their belt. This can only be achieved if the PI has done their initial research in a well-heeled lab, with a well-known head of the lab who is well-connected, and so on. This encourages a pyramidal structure with a lot of grunt students at the bottom, supervised by post-docs, supervised by assistant professors, and so on. Success encourages visibility, which encourages grants, which ensures money, which ensures good grunt students can be hired, and so on.
This is not the only possible successful structure, but one of the most common. A single researcher, however brilliant, cannot usually keep up with the outpouring of landmark papers the pyramidal structure can achieve. On the other hand, if everybody does their job, meritocracy in the pyramidal structure ensures that the best grunt students get promoted to post docs, and so on, usually in a different pyramidal structure.
The big drawback of the pyramidal structure is that the prof at the top usually doesn't know exactly what is going on at the bottom, even though they put their name on most of the papers that the structure produces.
Disclaimer: I'm a tenured prof. I do have a reasonable number of students, but I work with them directly. All my students are co-supervised with at least one other prof. Occasionally I do have a few post-docs but the structure is always collaborative. This is not the standard but this works well enough also as long as there isn't any ego-driven fights in the lab. This means choosing your collaborators well. I've made a few mistakes, but so far so good.
...what a lot of scientists do is they bring in a lot of students and act as project supervisors, as it says in the article: "Many of these prolific scientists are likely the heads of laboratories or research groups; they bring in funding, supervise research, and add their names to the numerous papers that result."..
But bringing in funding is in fact the bulk of the 'scientific' work. To bring in funding you must have a good research idea, a detailed research plan, the political nous to persuade others that it is worth spending money on, and then the management ability to make sure your ideas are followed through by the post-docs and students that you recruit to follow the plan. Of course you should get your name on the resulting publication.
This is "news" only to people who don't have a clue how research works - and usually the ones setting the publication criteria - like "you have to publish 2 journal papers per year" for an assistant professor (fresh post-doc or a PhD student), along with all the teaching load, of course. I was teaching 10 different courses (!) one semester and was still expected to actually do research half of my time and to publish those 2 journal papers.
Never mind that shepherding a journal paper through the review process and publication takes a year or two on average alone, plus you have to actually have something to publish to begin with. Even conference papers can take 6 months to publish and you must attend them as well (but nobody wants to pay for that!).
The prolific "publishers" are mostly professors that are heads of labs. They are not actually doing any of the work themselves. It is the young PhD students and post-docs who are slaving away in the lab, writing the papers and then put the name of the prof on the paper as a coauthor. It is a very common practice, basically giving a nod to the prof for paying their salary and letting them graduate. If you have a large lab with 20 PhDs who write 1-2 papers a year, that's alone 40 papers for the prof's CV annually. Then you get invited to contribute to various book chapters (again PhD students write that), you get invited lectures and what not - all that counts as publications.
The young researchers have absolutely no chance to break through in such competition where the number of publications is a criteria. You can have two very good papers but when you apply for an academic job, you have no chance against a guy with 40+ (no matter that most of them are the same thing publishes under different names or it isn't really their work). Unfortunately, that often leads to BS publications - like doing few minor changes and publishing the same work several times in different venues, publishing obvious, non-interesting "results" in minor, often in-house workshops or conferences, in the worse cases even scientific fraud and various misconduct - all for the sake of getting that number of publications up. It is only your job and chance for tenure that is at stake.
I have left university pretty much because of this - with no/not enough publications no chance to get a permanent position, but no chance to get those papers published if all you are doing is teaching teaching and more teaching (even though I love teaching). And when not teaching you are doing paperwork and trying to justify your own existence to various clueless bureaucrats every few months so that they don't cut your funding again. That's not exactly a situation where you can do research.
The problem is it is hard to distinguish the field leaders who direct their students from the ones who hire a bunch of non-English speakers who need to publish in English, but can't write comprehensibly, and then treat them like low-paid long-hours lab-techs. Lots of data, none of the career potential.
Also hard to distinguish the ones who do what they are supposed to do (show their grad students how to write and submit papers, introduce them to other leaders) from the ones who take credit and then dump on their juniors. The good ones have to compete with the people they graduate later, and at least some of those people will be brighter than they are.
You have to consider that even the least intelligent people with science phds and postdocs are still pretty bright. And the good ones who publish the most are normally working or schmoozing most of their waking life, far more than the innovators in most companies. Some labs are publishing factories where loads of postdocs churn out loads of papers each. The person running the lab has a significant impact.
I don't think this is a case where you just turf all these profs for putting out too many papers. The biggest issue is that there aren't enough jobs for current students so a lot of the best people burn out and leave. There is not much hope of making money before about 45 in most fields due to the number of years of study required. Outcompeting really bright people for 25 adult years and then getting stuck behind a bunch of tenured guys with dropping government funding sucks.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling