Publications are currency from a foreign land

In Academia, pubs pay the bills, but everywhere else, they're just paper.

I struggled explaining to my mom what it meant when I was publishing the first flush of journal articles from my dissertation. It soon became clear that she was never going to understand the professional milieu of academics.

No, I’m not getting paid for those publications. In fact, I paid a little bit in page charges.

Yes, I’m a “student” but I haven’t taken classes in years. I’m actually teaching quite a lot and mentoring college students.

No, I’m not going to get in trouble with my “boss” that I’m spending so much time in Costa Rica. This is what I need to do to succeed, it’s okay with everybody, I promise.

No, it’s not very likely that I’ll be able to get job as a professor anywhere near home.

No, it won’t help if I mention in my job application that I was an Eagle Scout. It would look weird and not help.

Yes, they like the publications, but no, they’re actually not that interested in the content. It’s just important that they exist.

When people say that academia is a hybrid of a cult and a pyramid scheme, what pieces of evidence do we have to refute such a claim? Dear reader, at this moment, I’m coming up empty.

Do people think that you’re making a difference in the world by simply bringing in grant dollars and converting those into our local currency, publications in peer-reviewed academic journals? And then going on a search committee and expecting that whoever we hire is doing twice as much as I did to get hired? Please tell me I’m wrong. I do get that grant dollars are often needed to make a difference, and publishing words can make a difference, but this is the means, not the end. Right?

Publishing a lot of scientific papers is highly valuable currency in this profession, but this coin is unrecognized outside the academic realm. Are they only of value because we say they are? Please tell me we haven’t gotten sucked irreparably into a Goodhart’s Law situation.

It’s exceptionally weird that being a successful professor means that you have to be good at many different things, but we aren’t trained whatsoever to do most of these things. Too many of us will tolerate destructive and harmful behavior by people if they’re good at the publication thing. It’s gotten old.

While a pages-long list of publications on a CV might be impressive to fellow academics, what does this matter to the people who we are trying to serve? Should the students who I am teaching in the classroom care how much I publish? If I’m working with a community organization to foster appreciation for biodiversity and climate action, how does my publication record matter to them? If I’m working on a science policy agenda, does a string of publications matter beyond the gravitas that it brings with some audiences? If I’m working to build a collaborative team to design an impactful research agenda, does a tall stack of papers help me do that? If I’m mentoring junior scientists to prepare for a career in STEM, does the publication list on my CV demonstrably change the experience that they have? If I’m expecting that my basic research will address a real-world problem, does the number of published papers really change how that work gets translated into real-world solutions?

While a CV with a lot of publications might be impressive to some academics, most people would be more impressed with the ability to do some cool yo-yo tricks or play a musical instrument, as they can more tangibly recognize these feats as something that takes a bit of practice and effort.

It’s been fascinating to watch the story of tenure-track and tenured faculty who have chosen to move on as part of the “great resignation.” A lot of us have done the math on what our institutions expect from us, how much we’re getting paid, and how much we are expected to work, and have decided to step away from this career path. We were attracted to this job because it offered flexibility, independence, creativity, (a promise of potential) job security, and a living wage. However, compared to a generation ago, being a professor nowadays involves less flexibility, more compliance, less security, and more work for relatively less pay. It’s not the plum job that it used to be, so I understand why so many of us are making the jump.

What might come as a big surprise to those of us deeply embedded in academic culture is that what we have achieved doesn’t matter so much as what we are capable of doing. That tall stack of publications might have zero value outside academia, but all of the talents that we racked up in the process of producing those papers can be highly valuable.

Can you recruit and supervise a competent team? How are you at writing grants, communicating research results, doing statistical analyses and interpreting data? Can you foster the talent of less experienced people, and can you manage projects from inception to completion? Can you tell a story and speak convincingly to board members, scholars, members of the public, and administrators? Can you look at a complex problem and break it down into distinct components that can be addressed in serial? Can you separate the trivial from the essential? Do you know how to get stuff done right before a deadline, and can you also do generative work when the calendar isn’t looming?

We are so entrained to quantify accomplishment, a lot of us aren’t prepared to recognize the generalized and highly applicable skills that we gain in grad school, as postdocs, and as faculty. Call them “soft skills” or “essential skills” or whatever, but all of us have a lot of talent in certain areas that simply do not appear on the standard academic CV. Where can I explain that I got people who had competing agendas in different departments to work together towards a common goal? What’s the line of the CV that explains how I worked with a student with absolutely no confidence and saw them grow fully into themselves when I supported them with opportunities? How can I explain to people that I know how to run a tight meeting that doesn’t waste anybody’s time? And know when to not have a meeting? Why is it that we take minimize the importance of leadership by calling it mere “service?”

These kinds of skills are what helps you succeed over the years, across organizations, and outside universities.

Yes, scientific publications are essential. This is where we announce discoveries, explore new ideas, hold one another intellectually accountable, and expand our understanding of the world. I absolutely love being a scientist, doing science, and sharing it with other scientists. But I’ve grown weary of the way we play this game where we overemphasize the importance of quantity and deemphasize the impact of our work within and beyond our scientific communities. To get a pub out because that’s what our system values? That’s no longer an incentive to me. I recognize that as a full professor I’ve accumulated enough social capital that I don’t need to do that anymore to prove myself to anybody, and I also recognize because of my identity, lots of people will just give me a free pass (and others may well assume I’ve landed where I am because of a series of free passes, which they’re entitled to imagine). I would like to value the contributions of junior scientists based on the the Why and the What rather than the How Many.

I’m proud of the science that I’ve done. And I’m excited for what I’m working on now, and even more excited for where it will take us. But when folks look at any publication record (here’s my google scholar link if you’re curious), I get peeved when people start to think of this as a measure of impact. Of course we are more than our h-scores. We say this all the time. We can point out that Einstein’s h-score was not that impressive. The reason we say keep saying this stuff is because it’s necessary to counter the prevailing narrative. To people outside universities who might try to understand the impact of our work, counting publication metrics as a measure of accomplishment would be downright silly.

We can all talk to one another and cite one another and impress one another, but how much of this genuinely advances knowledge? When the academic community’s own values and priorities are not groundtruthed, how can we tell the difference between sound science and masturbatory science? I’ve been thinking about this as my publication rate has plummeted over the past several years, realizing that this doesn’t bother me one bit. While some people might look at my CV and decide that my best days are behind me, I look at what I’m doing and recognize that it’s more impactful than ever. I might be publishing less, but I’m not publishing just to publish. And I’m doing work to grow capacity, train junior scientists, create educational opportunities, and build communities that has an impact on a greater scale.

When there is good science in our own field, we know it when we see it. And when there are leaders in our field, we feel their impact. How can we, as a scientific community, evolve beyond perverse incentives to publish in mass quantity and focus on the value of contributions? How can we emphasize the quality and impact of ideas and the value of the findings? I think most of us will agree that the selectivity of a journal is a poor indicator of the value of the science, and I think most of us will agree that we all would be doing better science if we were able to focus on quality over quantity. How do we get from here to there? I suppose one starting point is that if we are training more of our graduate students and postdocs to work in environments that have priorities that extend beyond pub-counting, that will change how we go about our daily business. I hope?