What Senior Scholars Quietly Think About Massive Publication Counts

If you’re in the research game, you eventually have this weird shift.You start discounting highly published people.Not because you’re bitter. Not because you’re jealous. But because you understand how much work is actually involved. And when you see a massive publication count, you start thinking: there are other effects going on behind the scenes that I can’t observe.If you talk to the elite of the elite researchers, they often know this. They’re suspect of people that publish too much.And here’s the part that sounds strange to outsiders: some people that publish less actually get more respect from very elite researchers, because they’re valuing good work and they’re not playing the game.The problem is the marketplace. Academia rewards a tremendous amount of publications. And that pressure is not really about the individual. It’s often at a higher level of analysis. Institutions push output. So people respond with networking. And networking, in my view, is often somebody with a tremendous amount of power publishing on the backs of people with less power.Sometimes it’s status. Sometimes it’s armies of junior folks. Sometimes it’s ghost writing. And we often look the other way.So you end up seeing two worlds:One world is constant talk about publications, how to publish, and leveraging networks.The other world is curiosity: that’s a cool idea, let’s make it better.You can feel the difference in ten seconds.There’s a term for what happens when the system is fixed and people focus on extracting value instead of growing value: rent seeking.I wish it didn’t happen. But it does.And once you see it, you understand a lot of the academic profession.