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I'm in opto/bio/eng. I think you misunderstand the 'real' reason for research papers as they currently stand: Money. It's a bit of a path, but I'll try and explain. In the US at least, research costs a LOT of cash. Many departments are chronically underfunded. In my state, the university only gets ~10% of it's funding from the state-house. The rest is grants. The only real writers of grants are the professor corps. So, departments look to the professors to fund the enterprise. Some of my advisers spent about 40 hours per week just on grant writing, neglecting the teaching and research hours required alongside. It is not a fun/good job. So most/all research is done by students, mostly PhD students, with little to no input from their advisers, and it's a stressful mess. As a result, most research is, well, amateur. Stats get mangled, code quality is non-existent, rats get loose, etc. Yes, yes, none of that 'actually' happens, but for real? It's a shitshow. So, where does that leave the PhD student that has been in the program for 7 years? They may have one first author paper, if that, a thumb-drive filled with nearly unreadable 'data', and a dozen failed experiments. Failed experiments don't get published, mostly because science is hard and doing all the controls to say that you have a genuine/real failure is much harder. So the professor, now running into a very firm deadline to graduate the student via the grad office, must rush and publish something, just to get the student to leave. The professor's track record in graduating students is part of their evaluation, as well as their publication record. Hence, the unreadable graduation paper; one of two types of unreadable paper. This paper is a targeted missile that is meant to do one thing: get the student off the payroll. It is not meant to be good, or a viable piece of science. It is never meant to be replicated. It is trying to be obtuse. It is there just to graduate a student, nothing more, nothing less. The other class of unreadable paper is the turf-war paper. These papers are also meant to be just readable enough, but not so much as to be repeatable. The reason is that the paper is a 'big' paper. What is published is meant to stake a claim in a 'big' area of the field. Hopefully this will guarantee more funding in the future as now that professor is a 'big' player in it. Hopefully no others can report that it is unrepeatable before the next grant comes in. The trick is make certain that the paper exposes just enough of the experimental design as to truly 'claim' the new big thing, but not enough that you can replicate at all. Karl Disseroth is infamous for this in the bio world. The paper creates jazz, but safeguards the turf of the lab from any other lab that may want to replicate it independently; they need the first lab to re-do it, and they must come with funding in hand. So, to sum up: papers are weapons. One type is the missile that causes a student to graduate. The other is a trap with a golden idol on it. |
I was already on the way out of science when I started working at that job, but the publish or perish culture really accelerated my departure.
It's also interesting how the current incentives really warp the incentive structures not just at big research universities, but also at small liberal arts colleges. I grew up as a fac brat, and so I've been able to tune into a lot of dialogue about the latest crop of new professors coming in to replace older professors as they retire, and a lot of the older professors are genuinely shocked at how little emphasis the newer professors place on teaching (traditionally what SLACs have focused on) compared to research. Even at schools with around 2000 students, new professors are demanding generous starter packages that no one would really have thought to ask for in the 70s.