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by weregiraffe
1937 days ago
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>Their primary incentive is to create grad students who cite their work. That's not true, the primary incentive is to generate new articles, which allow you to get more grants, which allow you to hire more grad students who generate even more articles. And the primary incentive of the grad student is to write as many articles as well, because good articles are what will allow them to advance in the academy. So really, motivations of supervisors and grad students generally align, and abusive PIs basically sabotage themselves. |
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Sure, the overall goal is to publish as many papers as possible, but their topic more often than not is solely determined by the advisor. Those papers may not end up helping the student to get a job upon graduation, unless their topic is one of the more exciting ones and the universities are actively hiring new faculty to pursue such things further. Tenured advisors are often not concerned about this issue since they already have their job.
It is also likely that the papers are backed by the current funding received by the advisor. It is exceedingly difficult for a former student who has become a new faculty member to get funding for similar projects because they would literally have to compete with their advisor for it. Some of the more cordial professors that I've seen would actually co-write future grants with their former students, so that everyone could benefit. But oftentimes I've seen professor impose a ceiling on a student's career aspirations, so they would be eliminated from competing for the funding in the long run. Regrettably, this often happens to bright ambitious students, who have made a mistake of revealing their ability to function independently early on.