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by foven
1153 days ago
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I think it is ridiculous to make such a sweeping statement about all of science when there is so much involved in each sub-field of science that brings its own problems to productivity and output. Take for instance the fact that nobody in Europe seems to want to do a PhD anymore and nobody in America wants to do a post-doc (based on my experience speaking to colleagues looking for both things in the respective places). That means very often you have to settle for what you get and what you get is not necessarily the best people. With regards to things being less disruptive, there are two issues here. One, the big papers that get published in i.e. Nature usually have extremely difficult techniques involved; something like low-temperature magnetic force microscopy that only a few research groups will have. This gatekeeps replication and further progression behind these few groups with these expensive piece of kit, so most people won't even care that it's happened. The other point I'd bring up is that a lot of research at the moment is not directly relevant to industry (so patents aren't quite as useful). Researchers are making absolutely insane devices to chase higher impact papers and patents that are so far ahead of where current industrial research is and wants to be that they're not going to adopt it easily at all. All this is to say that more funding is great (always) but I don't buy what the author is saying about a strong-link problem at all. To me this just puts the idea of Nature = good science into people's heads and encourages bad research. The process of good science is incremental steps towards a shared goal, and lots of reports on the way there that tip off other people and help build a bigger picture. |
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I think that is dependent on the field. Maybe this is true in CS or something. But nobody gets a faculty job in (for example) biomedical science without doing a postdoc. And often more than one.