Academic Publication-what is the big deal?

Someone explain what is the big deal with academic publishing? Is this for brownie points and bragging rights in academia, vanity, does it look great on a resume, is it all of the above. I have been researching it a little bit. I thought about attempting to get something published, but I am wondering is it worth the time and effort.

 

You might understand their usefulness if you read them for your field....I don't mean that disrespectfully.

 

It is how science is made. One conducts research and that research is judged by the academic discipline. Publishing the research is evidence of that judgment, and is the science being offered for the rest to read and know.

It is more central to an academic's existence than is teaching.

 

Most people who teach at the college or university level have a dream. That dream is to become recognized as a leading world authority in their favorite subject, so that they will be hired by a prestigious university, which will pay them well and provide them with comfortable working conditions and guaranteed lifetime employment, just so that they can continue to study their favorite subject.

It's a pretty good gig. There's just one catch: how do you become recognized as a leading world authority in your favorite subject ?

Answer: you publish papers about your ideas and discoveries, which are then read by other specialists in your subject, who are (hopefully) impressed. The more impressed they are, the more your academic cred rises. In practice, of course, not everybody is going to develop world-leading academic cred, no matter how much they manage to publish. But if you don't publish at all, then your cred is low or zero (hence the phrase "publish or perish")

Any increase in your academic cred also boosts the academic cred of your school. So most schools expect their faculty to publish regularly to some extent, although the expectations vary: they are obviously higher at a top research university as opposed to, say, a small undergraduate liberal arts college.

 

employability

Agreed.

Publishing also has an impact on your hiring prospects because it’s an external validation of your education. Potential employers all know of places that have the reputation of pushing people through doctoral programs for money. They are also aware of cases at more exalted places where someone apparently had an easy road to the PhD because after graduation it turned out they were dating someone in the department.

If your research is able to survive the tough peer-review and editorial processes and get published in the most rigorous journals, it’s a strong indicator you’ve really got what it takes – and will be able to deliver for your employers in the future. And, as someone else pointed out, most universities want their faculties to produce leading research.

 

different take

GREAT question. One that is not asked nearly enough.

I take a different angle on this, because frankly I think the entire system is built on a tremendous farce. In certain disciplines, research matters quite a bit-- medicine, certain social science disciplines, hard sciences. There are arguably others. However, try asking a dean, department chair, etc. in a no-consequence (and confidential) situation what they think about it. They'll tell you that publishing, in many fields, really provides no value on its own. I'll speak for business-- colleges pay newly-minted PhD's 150k to teach finance, accounting, management, etc. ROUTINELY. They are then pushed hard to publish, not teach. Why? If you ask anyone in the academy what the value of publication A is in Tier 1 Journal X, they simply can't tell you. They have no idea. My answer is that it has next to no value in many disciplines.

The short answer to your question is-- because it is the way colleges play a zero-sum competitive game with each other for prestige in their limited spheres of influence. It is tremendously wasteful and does little for the average student. Now, relevant research should have meaning for one's students. If handled that way, it really matters and can really make a difference. But publishing for the sake of publishing without regard to the instruction of others and the transfer of meaningful, actionable knowledge is reprehensible. And you heard it here--- this attitude will ultimately be what unravels the higher education system as we know it, as it is currently practiced. Someday the public, politicians, etc. are going to ask things like "why do terminal degrees matter" and "what is the practical value of academic research" and they won't like the answer (or non-answer) they get-- and colleges are bought in, must be bought in to the ensuing regulation by way of the student loan programs. They've got the means to control higher ed via finances, and they will if colleges do not become more sensitive to meaningless research.

I've got a PhD. I've published in a number of disciplines. I understand the game. However, this game colleges and universities are playing won't last forever.

 

Professors are not "paid to teach," then pulled away to do research. Research is a fundamental part of being an academic, even more than teaching.

Without research--theoretical and applied--you have no advancement of knowledge and, eventually, nothing to teach. You also do not move society. Advances in academic disciplines drive advances in their application, too. It is how we understand and improve our world.

 

What Rich says is the way it should work. What I'm suggesting is that there is a serious disconnect between what the public expects from higher Ed and what they're actually getting. Professors aren't paid to teach? I take your point, but try convincing a parent or state legislator of that. Better yet, push it that way in the statehouse. This is the perception problem we have. Everyone thinks professors are primarily teachers, except professors. This is a problem. Of course professors should research. But I think that privilege is abused by a fair number. There is an epidemic of outsourcing undergraduate education to everyone but tenured professors, those supposedly on the cutting edge. This is a problem that's not going away, and research of limited value isn't helping.

 

I sort of agree with Phdorbust. There is a lot of pointless research out there. Many professors are just conducting research because it's expected of them and aren't adding anything valuable to their fields. This reminds me of the Ig Nobel Prize.
Improbable Research

 

Much academic research is valuable and necessary. But I have to agree that a lot of it is neither. As with many academic trends, the situation is particularly bad at law schools:

 

Do you think you might be trying to quantify something that doesn’t lend itself to that?

 

I think the answer to this question strongly depends on the discipline of research. In humanities, publishing might seem pointless, since - yes, I exaggerate here - nobody apart from the researcher himself is really that interested in a new analysis of a text some dude wrote 10 generations ago. Similar things can and do happen in the natural sciences, i.e. there will also be a number of publications on problems which only the researcher himself deems to be important; this is usually a consequence of publish or perish. But, on the other hand, in the natural sciences scientific progress is a process of small steps, and the publication of a researcher from (say) Berkeley might after a while advance the research of a guy in Madrid, whose publication after a while might advance the research of a guy Texas. If one of them wouldn't publish, scientific progress simply would not happen.

I have been working as a researcher in one of those hard sciences. Some of my research results are used by researchers from all over the world (and made it into scientific computer programs); some of my stuff sounded fancy, but is probably only of academic interest; and in some of my stuff nobody had an interest but me.

 

How would you know that?

 

Absolutely I am. But such is the nature of education- very hard to measure, so we measure what is easy...terminal degrees, publication numbers, journal tiering. I just think higher Ed as a sector/industry needs to honestly reflect on the idea of research. Why am I doing it? Is it serving a common good? Is it worth the massive amount of resources we allocate to it?

This isn't about my position or arguments I am making. However, if you look closely at the original poster's question, many in academia consider it a sacrilege to ask it. That kind of question is one we should be asking ourselves all the time. If my best answer to "why do I publish" is because the system requires it, I consider that a really bad reason. Better reasons are to improve my teaching, advance understanding, challenge common beliefs. Anything less is circular, perhaps wasteful, and is going to invite the kind of accountability demands that secondary schools have to contend with.

 

And I'll add one thing. If you are paid 150k a year to crank out 5 pubs that NO ONE has read, that have no impact on your field, and that you don't bring to the classroom? Yeah I can figure out the value of that. We do it because it is expected of us. But should we?

 

1. Talking to college professors.

2. My experience with reading the literature in the social science fields and seeing a lot of junk and redundancy.

3. Always reading about stupid studies in the news.

4. Looking at the Ig Nobel Prize winners. The research they award is just a small sample of the pointless research out there.

CalDog provided a good example of useless research in law.

 

Is this true? Do you have actual examples of this, or is this just apocryphal?

 

Some good points, but it doesn’t have to be a box-ticking exercise. In the UK, universities just completed the Research Framework, in which academics submitted 4 outputs (articles, book chapters, monographs) from the previous four-year period to be evaluated by a committee of peers. There is a European ranking of the world’s journals, but individual articles are read and ranked according to their actual significance, not just their appearance as a line on the CV. This all goes towards the official ranking of the individual department, and contributes to informal ‘league tables’ ranking the universities as a whole, as well as the state funding of those universities. This process is a bit formulaic and rigid, but it does successfully hold people’s feet to the fire in a way that emphasises quality over quantity.

 

Your statement wasn’t an exaggeration, but a dismissal. Incidentally, research in the Humanities moves more slowly and is more subjective, but ultimately produces the same kind of process of increasing our understanding of the subject (sometimes by increments, other times by leaps).