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Publish or Perish
       The pressure to "publish or perish" is too much a driving force in the field of doctoral research, in the collegiate environment and in the scientific realm. All too often, whether an individual can carry out work that influences one's peers is the deciding criteria in maintaining a position and in advancing in one's field. In most cases, doing work that can be published in a worthy journal is required to earn a doctoral degree. When I was working on my doctorate in education, I was pleased by a decision at Central Connecticut State University. Rather than getting published, the satisfactory requirement was to either submit a paper to an accepted journal or to submit a paper to be presented at an accredited conference. The submission was all that was required. (I actually had a difficulty in deciding which path to take, so I followed both. My doctoral paper was "The Relationship Between the Frequency of Hands-On Experimentation and Students Attitudes Toward Science." The paper was published in September 2005 in the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers Newsletter and in the same year I presented at the Connecticut State University Faculty Research Conference.)
       On a broad scale, the pressure to publish is having an influential impact in the professional world. This was the key subject in "Paper Trail," an article by Frederick Joelving in the 10 January 2024 issue of Science. In his opening paragraph, Joelving noted: "Exploiting the growing pressure on scientists worldwide to amass publications even if they lack resources to undertake quality research, these furtive intermediaries by some accounts pump out tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles every year. Many contain made-up data; others are plagiarized or of low quality. Regardless, authors pay to have their names on them, and the mills can make tidy profits." In the following paragraph, he noted a new problem he had discovered. "Rather than targeting potential authors and reviewers, someone . . . was going for journal editors--offering large sums of cash to these gatekeepers in return for accepting papers for publication."
       In "Retractions Lag for Wave of Suspect Papers" in the 26 January 2024 issue of Science, Jeffrey Brainard reported about hundreds of faked research papers that were identified by whistle blowers, of which about half were retracted by the editors. However, "when the investigators contacted editors to encourage reviews of the remaining papers, the response was mostly silence." This attitude just encourages the submission and publication of poor papers, giving in to the general pressure exerted to have papers published.
       Another aspect is discussed by Emily Conover in "Chatbots Behaving Badly" in the 27 January 2024 issue of Science News. As she notes: "Current alignment techniques generally do a good job" at declining to answer questions that release negative information, but "researchers have discovered weird chatbox behaviors." This opens a channel to get erroneous facts included that imply falsehoods that can negatively influence society. This aspect similarly undermines the general perspective of scientific development. As in the former case, published material erodes the underlying basis of scientific progress.
       At the same time, universities are contributing to this broad problem. Michele Catanzaro addresses this in "Citation Manipulation Found to Be Rife in Math," which is in the 2 February 2024 issue of Science. As she notes, "mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues' citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work." In some cases, the universities do not even have math departments, but they "now produce a greater number of highly cited math papers each year than schools with a strong track record in the field, such as Stanford and Princeton universities." As Cameron Neylon notes, "movements in the ranking can cost or make universities tens of millions of dollars."
       "Dropping Disruption" is an article by Anna Funk in the March/April 2024 issue of Discover. Analyzing a 65-year period of research papers and patents, it reveals that there has been a decline in innovation, referring to research by Russell Funk in the January 2023 issue of Nature. She then notes: "A number of additional factors likely drive the decline, like pressure to publish more papers, and the increased difficulty for disruptive ideas to get funding and for such papers to pass peer review. There's also inertia in running a research program, both in terms of specialized knowledge as well as supplies and lab equipment."
       Adam Savage was one of the hosts on MythBusters, which appeared from 2003 through 2016 on the TV Discovery Channel. In his editorial in the 16 February 2024 issue of Science, H. Holden Thorp referred to an interview he had held. "Savage felt that when a different result arises, people tend to think that science 'got it wrong' to begin with. The message of science as a self-correcting process is obviously not getting through." Thorp went on to note that "Savage agreed that science is experiencing enormous difficulty in changing strong views about topics like vaccine and climate change." The misinformation in the media plays a central role regarding this. In the same issue, a separate article by Paul Voosen concerns the positive court decision regarding the defamation of a climate scientist. Voosen credits Gene Policinski with pointing out that "the ruling could end up chilling public criticism of science."
       Back in 1966 and 1967, I worked at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York on a paper titled "Measuring a Scientist's Influence in Science," which was unfortunately never published. We used data from the Science Citation Index, produced by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. Four years later, in 1971, I did work for ISI that used Venn diagrams in a repeated do-loop to discern what fields a journal actually covered, rather that accepting the classification supplied by the editors.
       For almost sixty years, I have been viewing first-hand the negative changes that have occurred in this field. It is long overdue for positive changes to occur. The quality of teaching should be a priority factor in hiring professors in colleges and universities. The research is important from the school's perspective, but it should be a secondary component. At the same time, the pressure to publish should be downgraded and the quality of the published papers should carry more weight than merely being published or cited. The view of the general public is critical for the support needed for funding scientific research and education, and this needs to be recognized and accepted on all levels, while also investing time and energy in seeing that the public has an honest understanding of what is going on in research and where we are headed.
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