Science as advertising
There’s a dirty secret floating around the halls of academia today, which most researchers would like to pretend doesn’t exist, but that still haunts our field. The public’s vision of a scientist is of some disinterested nerd searching for truth for its own sake, motivated by an innate love of knowledge- philosophy in the original sense of the word. However, the reality is that most scientists, like most journalists, live in a brutal world of “publish or perish”, where the quest for pubs overrides any higher calling. When I talk with fellow colleagues, the conversation is sometimes about this or that exciting new finding, but more often about this or that cool publication, and how we can spin our results to tell a similarly sexy narrative. This is even more apparent among younger scientists, like me, who grew up viewing dissertations not as a complete corpus, but as a collection of research papers stapled together.
It’s not that competition is bad for science. On the contrary, competition between academics, often incredibly fierce competition, has driven many of the key discoveries of the modern era. The emphasis in the past, however, was on developing an overwhelming body of research backed by a clear theoretical framework- while there were wunderkinds who wrote one precocious paper and got famous, the most respected scientists got their reputation slowly and incrementally. The emphasis today is squarely on MPUs, “Minimum Publishable Units” that can be pushed quickly out the door, preferably to some high profile journal (there’s even a quantitative way to measure the Impact Factor of a journal now, which some people dutifully tally up). In science, like many parts of American society, the time horizon of planning has gotten shorter, and planning a research program 2 or 3 years out is now considered overly ambitious for anyone who isn’t running a federally-funded long-term research site. This short-term ambition affects research choices, and affects the very questions that scientists consider. My mentor, an ecologist at UNC, spent the better part of two decades collecting data from some 10,000 field locations before he published a single line on it, all to make sure that when he wrote a book on the topic it would be definitive. I can’t imagine collecting data for any time period longer than a summer and not publishing on it. I can’t help thinking that the world is better off for his approach than for mine, and my brethren of young scientists, hell bent on “making a name” for ourselves.
