The ubiquity of academic publications
Somehow I completely missed all the fun people were having with Randall Munroe’s comic about scientific papers this past week, but it came to my attention through this Atlantic article elaborating on his criticisms. I largely agree with the critiques of academic publishing, particularly that the publish-or-perish model is detrimental to academic progress as a whole. But, I do want to push back against the idea that it’s inherently problematic that “The scholarly literature in many fields is riddled with extraneous work” (par. 4). It’s true that the current model leads to unnecessary moves like “The results from one experiment [getting sliced up] into a dozen papers” (ibid), but it’s also problematic to view true progress as only coming about through rare works of staggering genius.
The truth is somewhere in the middle, and progress requires a lot of incremental advances that seem pretty extraneous on their own. As when people bemoan academic research that reports “what everyone already knows”¹, which ignores the value in rigorously confirming things we assume to be true (as well as the fact that we don’t know in advance if an experiment is going to confirm a long-held belief or refute it), academic research that doesn’t seem to do very much on its own might actually be valuable in conjunction with all the other little, innocuous steps, which may in turn help to achieve the bigger breakthroughs.
Progress doesn’t rely on individual success — either individual papers or people — despite the Western insistence on this Romantic notion of progress and genius. Progress relies on the slow, steady accumulation of knowledge from a wide variety of sources — we don’t just stand on the shoulders of giants, but also among all the regular-sized people also doing the work. This means that it’s a good thing if a researcher also encounters, and importantly has access to, lots of papers that don’t say anything monumentally important, or that present failed research, etc, because that gives them more to draw on and a more complete picture of the field.
Again, this isn’t to say that there aren’t problems. The above requires access, which too many people currently don’t have², for one; for another, a lot of this kind of extraneous work could probably be published in a slightly different format — e.g., something between a note and a full, peer-reviewed paper. But, to my mind, the problem with modern academic research is not that there’s a lot of it and that much of it isn’t super-important — rather, that’s one of the benefits of an increasingly more diverse, global, and technological academic community. The trick is to change institutional structures to make that work for academia and society, not to bemoan the fact that lots of academic papers aren’t truly important.
¹ Just to be clear, this quote doesn’t come from the Atlantic article, as the others do. This is just me paraphrasing something I hear/read a lot.
² My preferred level of access to research is “everyone should have it free at point of use”. See, among others, Nathan J Robinson’s great article on this, “The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free”.
