What If Papers Are Holding Us Back?

A popular LinkedIn post and my sense of discomfort with the state of academia.

I posted a similar question a few days ago on LinkedIn and was surprised by the response. This is probably the most popular post I have ever made on the platform. At the time of writing, it had 117 likes and 51 comments. I did not expect this reaction, but somehow, it resonated with many people.

This is the full text of the message I posted:

What if our obsession with papers is going to make academia irrelevant? 🤔

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately. Something feels deeply broken in how much of what we do rests on this distorted/abused metric. Papers are great and important! Writing them made me a million times better as a thinker. However … the excessive role they play in all the incentives we have (hiring, promotion, finances, etc.), create huge distortions. The one that worries me the most is that writing papers, once you learn the craft is not longer a particularly ambitious goal. There’s so much more a highly trained person can do than convincing 3 peers that their work is worth publishing!

Academic friends: how do you feel about that? Do you also feel we are using horses 🐴 in a world of flying cars 🚀?

I have been thinking about how academia works for a long time and feeling a growing sense of discomfort from what I see. However, I have been quite reticent about sharing my thoughts because, somehow, my thoughts are not completely formed, and I do not have particularly brilliant solutions in mind.

This post was inspired by the pervasive obsession with papers I observe in our world. In academia, everything is measured by papers (and grants). You are admitted to a PhD program if you have demonstrated that you can write papers. If you have some published, you immediately jump to the top of the list. You graduate and receive praise/attention if you have published papers in top-tier journals or conferences. Same with jobs after you graduate. If you apply for academic positions or research labs, having many papers in top venues will always make you stand out, at least to get an initial interview. The same story applies to the rest of your career: tenure, promotion, etc.

There are several problems with this state of affairs. The first one is paper inflation. Having one paper accepted in a top venue used to be something special, but since everyone is maximizing for the same metric, it’s not that special anymore. There are stories of people who apply for entry-level faculty jobs with tens of papers in “prestigious” conferences and journals. How is this even possible? The second and more important one is that it is not evident to me that publication is particularly correlated with quality or impact. Having papers accepted is hard initially, but it’s fundamentally a game of figuring out a way to do the work and what reviewers tend to like. It’s not easy, but it’s not particularly ambitious either. Put in enough years and effort, and you can kind of crack the code. There is more. Maybe the biggest elephant in the room. Having a paper accepted feels rewarding (very rewarding) but does not change much in the world unless people read it and it becomes influential.

By writing this, I may give the impression that I am against papers or consider them unnecessary, but this is not my point! Papers are indeed relevant and necessary. They are still a great form of communication. They force people to think deeply about their work. They are structured to keep track of connections between disparate “islands” of knowledge. They require a high level of rigor (even though they can lead to cargo cult science). Above all, they are necessary to communicate and challenge ideas as quickly as possible so that the scientific community can stay up to date with what is happening. And this is where the real and maybe lost power of papers lies. Above all, papers are a means to communicate information, and they are only useful to the extent that they help the scientific community thrive. Their use for honor badges and career advancements is, in the end, a distortion and a betrayal of their original intent.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if this excessive focus on papers would lead only to too many publications and imperfect metrics. But the problem goes deeper than that. If you read the comments of my original LinkedIn post, you’ll find disaffectionate people who loved the research but despised the system, and because of that, they left. Does it need to be like that? What a waste! What if the very people who are more in love with the research are those who are more likely to leave?

Take this comment from a tenured professor who left academia as an example:

“I would say the obsession with papers and grantsmanship with less emphasis on implementation was a big reason I left academia after tenure. Certainly research and academic publishing made me a better thinker and communicator, but there comes a point where somone’s intellectual captital need to be spent bridging the knowledge to practice gap rather than reformatting manuscripts and grants to different specs.”

How about this one from another commenter?

“I left academe, primarily because of the "publish or perish" metric. I got no sense of pride or satisfaction writing something very few would read and even fewer could act on.”

Something is broken. I have heard similar comments from colleagues that I consider incredibly brilliant. They have so much to give the world, yet they struggle with the system.

Another problem I often experience in my day-to-day work is that many students in our lab are constantly worried about papers. They think their career is all about getting a certain number of publications out, and the sooner they get there, the better. This creates pernicious effects. The students are constantly anxious about their “performance” and rushed. Furthermore, they take paper acceptance as the ultimate goal when, in fact, the ultimate goal is growth and impact. It does not really matter how many new lines you have in your CV if they do not translate into a compelling story you can tell people when you interview for a position.

There is much more to say, and I will try to articulate more ideas in this newsletter on the state of academia in the future. I think the time is ripe for a change. I often feel like we use horses in a world of flying cars. Maybe I am wrong, I can’t tell … but something feels terribly off lately.

I’d be curious to hear what you think. If you have a personal story to share or some reflections to offer, please leave a comment below. And if you disagree with me either at a fundamental level or on some parts, that's great, too. Let me know what you think!