Publish or perish

Publish or perish

Literature reviews are getting harder by the day, not only because there are too many papers published in scientific journals and conference but also because most of them tell little if anything new. The pressure to publish regularly and the constraints journals impose in the name of proper research are trivialising publication. I'd rather have people publish one significant thing every five years than cut it up into ten pieces so that two papers can be publish every year.

Another thing is that we shouldn't equate publication with research. Publications and citations are useful indications but essentially proxies of one's work. Research is about getting to know stuff and many times it amounts to replicating what others have already done in order to fully understand it. How does one measure this deep, thorough understanding? Review papers could be a way but journals do not encourage them. Finally, one should not underestimate reading: big chunks of research time go into reading - not just browsing the abstracts and conclusions in order to collect citations for one's own papers but proper reading, with full comprehension. That's not just a preamble to doing one's research, it's a core research activity and performance.