lmh wrote:
Original poster, none of this rant is intended to target you! You are blameless, it's just the daft job-requirement that's making me angry:
Candidly, this sort of requirement makes me rather grumpy. I'd guess that in the time that's elapsed since I did my PhD, the number of papers published in that field per year has gone up ten-fold. Back then, nearly every paper was valuable. Now I'd guess 90% aren't worth reading. Nevertheless, institutions have to carry the burden of paying for all this wasted publication-space (either as pay-to-publish fees, or in the form of subscriptions to journals and journal-bundles from big publishers). Individuals have to waste their time reviewing all this stuff. Individuals have to waste even more time trawling through it to find the paper that actually contains useful information. But worst, highly capable scientists have to leave the lab, stop working on something useful, and instead stress themselves concocting half-hearted efforts to inflate their publication lists.
We live in a world where there are now so many unnecessary journals that the minor ones are even publishing stuff where the reviewers have attempted to say "No! Enough! Stop!". Meanwhile the impact-factor-driven pressure to get a publication in the top journals is so high that ethical standards have been known to slip. And here, too, the desire for spots in top journals is being exploited ruthlessly by the publishers, who can spawn side-kicks from their main titles, each requiring yet another subscription (Nature, here's looking at you...), where good dissemination of research would be served better were the side-kick papers published in what used to be the straightforward mainstream journals.
I have to agree. Recently I have been getting tons of emails from AAAS wanting me to join so I can get a copy of "Science" which used to be a good journal for science topics. I checked out their website and it seems over half of what they promote are climate change articles.
I don't dismiss climate change off hand, but most of the articles I read on the subject have results that are highly questionable when you apply the laws of chemistry and physics to them. The push to Publish or Perish leads to papers where the quality control of the data being used to back up the results is very lax.
Fraish, As long as the topic is relevant and the data is sound, go for it. We honestly need some good useful papers to make up for the poor ones that flood the journals and only try to appeal to the non-scientific public at large. Publish with purpose, not for prestige.