[tony_cannistra]

"Invest in projects, not papers."

This is excellent advice, and in my experience does not represent the intuition that many young (and not so young) researchers begin with.

Papers come from projects and, if you care, good projects can yield many good papers!

[accurrent]

The problem is my supervisor only cares about paper count.

[voiper1]

Article's point seems to be that in the long term: paper count, citations, impact, motivation and fulfillment will all come from focusing on a project.

[accurrent]

I tend to agree but there are way too many paper mills out there and Ive been stuck in one.

The gamification of google scholar is real

[juujian]

Idk, nothing wrong with going for a low-hanging fruit and doing a one-off sometimes. So many academics fail to get stuff over the finish line. Not the right advice for everybody.

[stavros]

Yeah, but it's not saying "don't do papers", it's saying your long-term investment should be projects.

[danielmarkbruce]

Interesting. This is a common problem in academia?

[juujian]

Depends on the person. Not unheard of to see people with 10+ working papers that realistically will never see the light of day. Each of those are months of work.

[danielmarkbruce]

I can see that I guess. Easier to start a new one than do the annoying parts to finish one.

[tony_cannistra]

nothing wrong except that it might be a distraction, which sometimes is good and sometimes would be better avoided.

[space_oddity]

Focusing on quantity over quality is nearly always a bad idea