To Whom Are Scholars Slaves? The fall of scholars and rise of publication industry

“Which journal do you target?”: A no-brainer interview question

Of course, an employed scholar should target those top tier journals in his/her field. By ‘targeting a journal’, people mean write articles tailored for the journal: studying topics that journal likes to publish, testing theories that journals’ reviewer base is familiar with, even make conclusions that journal likes to make.

Why would scholars target journals? Shouldn’t we do research we consider important first and then find a journal to publish it? Why would people start from a journal and back-engineer the process? Well, simply because it is easier to publish this way and scholars, who make a living by doing research, need to crank up their publications as early, quickly, numerously as possible. Those who do not ‘target journals’ are selected out of the system through competition as job reviews look at hardly anything else than the scholar’s number of pubs and impact factor of journals.

Should scholars get paid for their work?

It really doesn’t matter what we think should happen. An academic journal doesn’t pay its submitters for their work and it knows its agreement to publish their papers alone is enough to keep the scholars grateful and keep sending papers to them in future. Many internships either don’t pay or don’t write recommend letters. Very few are willing to do both. Why waste more resource if people can do with less?

Journals

The Journals, on the other hand, have their own calculations. If you think the owners of a journal know or care about science, think twice. First of all, they care about profit. To maximize profit, they want to maximize influence of the journal, which is measured by its number of citations (impact factor).

de-mystifying publication

Why the published articles may not be the only valuable articles, even not the best ones: The Problems of Reviewers and the Reviewing Process

I will use personal experience as examples. I submitted a research paper to a journal. Only one reviewer replied with her rejection comments.

The reviewer commented that I was supposed to review theories and derive hypotheses in the introduction part according to APA style. But I was not testing any hypotheses with this paper. A structure (or format) of writing is useful for clear communication. But reviewers have been so reliant on a certain structure that they become incapable of assessing the quality of a paper without it. The reviewer assumes a fixed logical structure of the research and imposes this assumption on the writer, so that the reviewer could ‘understand’ what the paper did by only looking at a few key points and expect the rest would just fall into place under this logical structure. However, if the paper violated the reviewer’s assumption by using a different logic structure, then the reviewer would have to really read the paper to understand it. The reviewer already lost both her intention and her ability to fully understand what the author argues. The reviewer sees using a different logical structure almost as a methodology mistake. Structure of a research should be determined by its research goal and content. Some studies are better presented, even sometimes only presentable, in a different structure.

The reviewer said the small groups I was using were made up of only 5 people, too few to have enough statistical power to find anything significant. But I did find significant relations. More importantly, my paper was exactly to solve this problem of analyses with small group sizes. And I applied a way of analyses with enough statistical power even in small groups. So literally, her accusation was exactly this paper’s contribution. I am pretty sure she didn’t carefully read let alone understand the paper. She was just searching for simple reasons to reject it. I don’t think a reviewer admitting that she doesn’t understand a paper is an embarrassing thing. But she kept talking in a tone that blames the rejection on my fault.

She went on justifying her decision by saying that her time was too valuable to review papers like this one. She sounded so sure my paper was garbage and my submission of the paper to the Journal wasted her time. She suggested that I read papers from their journal and see what kind of papers they published. She ended by saying that she believed other reviewers would agree with her. My readers, if you don’t know me, you feel free to assume the paper was indeed crap. But I know me and I don’t think the paper was a waste of time. I presented the same paper in an international conference if you have to hear some evidence.

Reviewers are not always experts in a field. They are simply the ones who have published in that journal and got hold of by the editor at that time. A professor I respect used to turn off a review request from an editor because he wasn’t qualified to review that paper. Editors have little idea about who is capable of reviewing which paper. Once they get a submission, they find a reviewer based on their network. They usually find good reviewers if the paper is on one of the journal’s few established topics. But if one doesn’t target one of those few topics, one would need some luck.

Reviewers review articles for the editor for free using their own time, while they have to teach, research and try to publish their own papers. The reviewers’ effort on the reviewing job is not supervised. There is no one to review the reviewer. Good journals may assign up to 3 reviewers, but many only do 2 and some even only 1. Even if the reviewers don’t agree with each other, it has no feedback to the reviewer’s own profile. A reviewer will not be discredited if he/she disagrees with 2 other very good reviewers. Because reviewers are not paid, they are qualified to complain. They think they are doing the field a favor. And in many ways they really are. Because reviewers are not paid, they cannot be fired or punished in anyway. The worst thing I can imagine is that no one let’s them review any more in the future. But that is a dream for most reviewers. Because reviewers are not hired, they are under no obligation or regulation except what their conscience demands. The reviewers are the only last mechanism deciding whether a paper gets published. In some rare cases the editor will chime in but with limited effort and influence. Doesn’t it sound problematic that the whole scientific publication industry is based on the good conscience of people struggling to make a living?

Demystifying “Academia”

The word “scientist (or professor)” conjures respect and mystery. In folklores, scientists take the form of an old Einstein-like man with crazy hair working in a lab on things that nobody understands. But in reality, scientist (or professor) is hardly anything more than a job nowadays.

Within a field, among people with necessary training, publishing peer-reviewed academic papers is not that hard as long as one is willing to target a journal, because the journals need a fixed number of papers for their regular issues. As long as a paper beats all the other papers written in that period of time, it gets published. The way to beat other papers is not by innovation, showing flares, high quality, choice of valuable topic etc. None of these. The only correct way to successfully hit the targeted journal right in the bull’s eye is to write a paper on a topic accepted by the journal’s reviewers without obvious mistakes. And we have to admit again that being able to pull this off indeed shows experience, knowledge and wisdom. But most people mistake this ability for academic rigor. Journals would also claim they publish the papers of highest value and quality and they do nothing but to choose the ones that fit their reviewers’ taste. The two are not exactly the same thing. A scholar’s ability to publish in peer reviewed journals says more about his/her career strategy and willingness than research ability. Prestige, as a result under the metric-driven academic culture, goes to those who are most strategic, willing and fitting in the field. The academia is being modeled into an industry where strategy weighs over value and quality. There is less and less difference between academia and wall street.

Admittedly, scientists do have more knowledge of the literature in a certain domain compared to regular people. But scientists’ knowledge and abilities vary largely across individual and the least set of knowledge necessary for someone to be a scientist is very limited and quite attainable through training for many disciplines. Being a scientist (or professor) doesn’t mean a person is generally smarter than others in every aspect; it doesn’t even mean the person is smart. It only means a person went through the necessary training and was then put on a position that allowed him/her to call him/herself a scientist (professor).

A personal experience could maybe demonstrate what I mean. I had a professor from a master-level core curriculum class. She required that I write my literature review in logical order. I thought I did. But she kept highlighting that I had to follow logical order. Then I realized through her explanation that by logical order, she meant chronological order. She pointed out that I was talking about some older papers after some more recent one and that was not logical to her. In another class, she was questioned why she made some claims in her paper. All she was able to say was that another published paper said the same thing so she must be right. I asked her about a famous scholar whose work was known to be deep and hard to read. She said that scholar’s research was not her interest, but their works were clearly related. You get the idea. She had many publications and was cited by many. She was good at the publication game and that was the only thing she was good at.

The falling of academia into a field where research papers become a commodity of mass production is a sign of industrialization and capitalization of the human-intelligence-based work. To be a bit more extreme than I actually want to propose, just to make clear the direction I am going, I want to say this: anything that is mass-producible is inhuman. We don’t like a machine to write 100 movies a day. We look down upon those writers who publish a million words every year. And we don’t want the love songs written by algorithms in a milli-second. Then why do we allow academia to mass produce barely useful research papers on the assembly line of graduate students? So that more people could be scientists, professors and experts? So that more people could be prestigious elites with contributions? But we wake up to find those titles don’t mean shit any more. Another sign of the companificiation and industrialization of academia is that it is shifting to a highly incremental growth model. The reviewers, as a matter of fact, under time pressure, without clear regulations or incentives, tend to select the papers that are on a few established topics with conservative contents. Apple doesn’t want to give us the next big thing but only want to do incremental changes on its iphones and give users the next thing that’s slightly bigger. Academia is doing the same. It is publishing things that are incrementally evolving, but completely rejects even attempts to be revolutionary. A professor of mine told me her career secret: “to do research that is 80% traditional with 20% fancy stuff”. Another wiseman also said, “if you can take 10 steps forward, don’t, only take 1; maybe not even 1, just start with a half.” But evolution studies suggest a person cannot come into being by adding body parts one by one through generations. Just like we cannot ride only the front wheel of the bike the first day, ride the front wheel plus the frame the second day and ride the whole bike the third day. We either have a whole bike, or we don’t. The point is, some inventions and discoveries are not possible if we only allow incremental changes to our studies. In addition, incremental change can easily get stuck in local optima. That is exactly the case with, say, the persuasion research. Thirty years ago, they were predicting and explaining the same thing they are doing today, maybe even better. Scholars who study evolution on rugged landscapes may chime in. The only reason this model happens in academia was for the publishing companies to have a steady flow of papers to generate steady cash flow. We all know that really good papers are rare and random. So, the publication industry created the model that allows every scholar to publish on a regular basis without being visited by their muse.

Did this business model create jobs? No. it created work to do and markets for those works to be shared, but not jobs that pay. The jobs in universities are still limited and more people who can publish only means an increased standard for employment and more desperateness for publications. Many scholars, good ones, have to hop across multiple post docs before landing at their first assistant professor job in their 40s.

The Higher-Ed-Government complex

Why did so many people choose to be scholars? A few are interested in what they study, good at what they study and study for fun. They are destined to be scholars. To most others, it is just a job. Many undergraduate students who couldn’t find jobs but feel they could stand school for a few more years choose to go to graduate school. That is where the on-boarding process begins. A large part of graduate school training is how to publish papers. The naïve young minds at this point don’t know much about the publication industry and still think it’s a rare gift to be able to publish. All they were taught to read was these journal articles. The universities make it obvious to them that publications and grants are the only currencies in academia. Some of the graduate students will decide to join the P-game, beg their ways into a professor’s research team and become part of the assembly line. By the time they graduate, they will have some second to seventh authored publications to begin with.

Higher education institutes supply the academic field with a redundancy of graduate students well trained to perform on the publication assembly line, over-qualified for front-desk receptionist jobs, under-qualified for research team leaders, pushed by graduation, desperate to land somewhere for the next a few years. When these young people look at their cards in hand, they consider it their rational choice to join and play the P-Game.

What about grants? Grants are like a derivative commodity from publications. Those who are more successful in publications are put in more prestigious positions and are better known. Then they have better chances to get grants. I used to take a grant writing class. The only thing that would make a program officer look good is, guess what, you are right, publications that come out of the grant. Being able to publish and publish numerously is a must for grant application. Everything comes back to and is ultimately anchored in publications. There is just no other evaluation of today’s scholars except for publications.

It definitely is easy to operate this way. Just look at a person’s google scholar profile, look at the number of publications and journals, one will know if this scholar is good or bad. People lie to themselves by saying, “well, experts have reviewed this paper, so it must be correct” or “if this paper is crap, why so many people cite it? so it must be useful.” Just to point out some facts, for social science research, reviewers don’t replicate the research. Many citations are just to back up what the writers wanted to say. Many papers are cited because it says what many people need someone to say. All this could have little to do with value in the real world. I can name a few social scientists whose research is well-written meaningless crap. Don’t tell me they don’t exist. I adore their ability to climb so high with such cheap work. I wonder when one of them published in Science, was he thinking “I finally solved some real problem” or “I am the best scholar in Harvard”? And yes, I am including that Science paper when I said crap.

College teaching …

A professor advised me to publish more and said: “let’s be honest, we scholars want either money or fame. You need to use your productive years to get it while you are still young and full of energy.”

• My response: First, I do not want publications; I want to publish my work. See the difference?
• Second, you want fame and money. I want the research I’m doing to get me fame and money.
• And last, I agree that a scholar may only have up to, say, ten years of productive time. But that doesn’t mean I should use it your way. Your words sound helpful, but they contain venom.

Another professor told our class, “a new research needs to stem from old research and speak to current body of literature in order to benefit the field. So, you need to make enough citations, put your research under the same paradigm and test the same theories.”

• My response: I simply don’t agree. This whole teaching is useless for science. If my research is useful, it is useful. We should discuss the content of my research rather than the form it should take. If a certain structure is the best way to write a paper, then I better write my paper that way. As simple as that. Your teaching confuses me.

Another professor taught in class: “… don’t worry too much about how the math works in this method. What’s more important is what theoretical questions you are interested in and how you interpret the result to answer your question…”

• My response: you are wrong and misleading and should be responsible for what’s happening in our field. How can you answer a theoretical question without understanding exactly how the math works?

What we must do

1. Find Alternative ways to evaluate scientists Exams. I know I know. I know we all hate exams. But it is an alternative to keep scholars on their toes and force them to keep sharpening their minds. If, say, one associate professor didn’t get enough publications to get her tenure, well, she could take an exam to prove her worth.

2. Start scientist unions and union-owned non-profit journals The scholars are the generators of the research papers and they are the readers/consumers of the research articles. The whole game of scientific publication is their own self-entertaining game. The scholars as a whole community, could totally initiate a content sharing framework. Under this framework, scholars submit papers, review for each other and share with each other. There doesn’t even need to be publication. All submissions could be made public in the shared database available to everyone. All papers are published. Some are peer-reviewed and some are not. Some are agreed by peer-reviewers and some are not. It is like Wikipedia for journal papers. But in order to do this, the scholars need to unite.

3. Scholars should ask for payment from For-profit journals: if you get paid, I get paid If a scientist who publish books get paid manuscript fees plus royalty on their books, they should also get paid for their publications in academic journals. How much they are to be paid should depend on the number of times their papers are cited. A well cited paper should be more valuable and should earn its authors more profit.

On the other hand, scholars should pay to cite papers. After the university purchases the journal’s content, all scholars should be free to read them and learn from them. However, if they want to draw insights from others’ papers, develop them into new publications and make money, they need to pay tribute to those who helped them. Just like in the music industry, if one singer adopted melodies from older songs, the singer would need to pay a fee to the old song’s copy right owner.

Economists and copy right lawyers should study how regulations should be made. The point of introducing economic market mechanisms into academia is this: to use the supply-demand law to regulate the production of research papers. A key problem of the current academic publication system is that there is no feedback mechanism for academia to see itself in the mirror and realize that it is not doing useful work. Currently, the scholars in some field could produce thousands of useless papers, read each other, cite each other, and repeat and the whole field is going nowhere. The university keeps purchasing the academic journals’ contents only to pay for the scholars’ self-entertainment. The few really useful papers are lost in the overwhelming sea of useless ones. But if the right market mechanism is introduced, it would be more expensive to publish a paper useless to everyone and the cost for such publications will mitigate the increasing numbers of the unnecessary papers drafted only to add more lines to the CVs.

We used to believe science is self-correcting because peer review will catch mistakes in new studies. That is very true in natural sciences. But in social sciences, reviewers don’t replicate the studies they review. They have no choice but to take the authors word for it. The review can only capture inconsistencies with the reviewers’ knowledge of the topic. If the whole field is wrong or on a wrong track, then there is no mechanism to raise any red flags. We want to believe the reviewers are enough to identify useful studies and papers that advance the field. But a field with homogeneous reviewers who all share the same training and perspective could walk into a self-reinforcing dead circle.

To sum up, there need to be a cost for publishing papers and there needs to be a reward for useful valuable papers. There needs to be a market driven way of deciding the price of a journal’s contents. We need to regulate the endless publication of useless papers by making them too costless to publish.

Some questions remain:

1. What about papers that are valuable but whose value is not realized right now? won’t it make those papers hard to publish?
2. what about those topics that are supposed to be done incrementally, needing many people to study many aspects of it bit by bit?

Concerning question 1, my response is that those papers could go to non-profit journals that are not regularly released and not require payment.

As for question 2, my response is those fields who require a lot of small works rather than big breakthroughs could publish small reports. These reports are a few hundred words explaining the topic and finding with data shared, presenting only the parts other scholars need to know to do work collectively as a field. These reports would be of low cost to publish and one journal could publish hundreds of them per issue. And these reports may weigh, say, ten percent of a paper on a resume. The idea is: there needs to be a way to reward big breakthroughs over small incremental research. They cannot both count as “one publication”. The publications have to be weighted in such a way that one big, thick, juicy paper is worth spending “years of no publications” for. One way to make that possible is through introducing monetary reward.

So to whom are (social science) scholars slaves?

The scholars’ hard work may have earned them tenure as well as money and fame. But the true master whose rules they dare not violate is the scientific publication industry. The money and influence scholars made for themselves is nothing compared to what they earned for their master. More importantly, so many scholars serve their publication industry with their soul. They whole-heartedly believe in the ways pointed out by their masters and teach them to their students. They are not even hypocrites because they truly believe in what they say and they teach their shameless philosophy to their students in the most high-profile advising language, e.g. “I used to think like you, but I wish someone told me this in my early career…” They care only about “what works” and they totally have no idea of “what should be”. They care about money and fame; they care about power and influence; they care about career success; but their vocabulary doesn’t include truth.

We all have to make compromises in real life. We all have to give up our tenet at some point if we are cornered. But these scholars give it up to the world right in the beginning before anyone even asks them to. They start without any moral standards holding them back. The scholars are supposed to be the poets in the ivory tusk tower daydreaming about the highest arts and sciences that will change the humankind in the next thousand years rather than butlers in a palace diligently polishing the score board of a publication game. Look at what the publication industry plus the higher-ed-government complex had done to the population that’s supposed to be the most unworldly backbones in a society. Don’t anyone ever compare our scholars to those in ancient Greek.

The scholars today are more of a slave to their own lack of faith in the truth, the good and the beautiful than a slave to the publication industry or the higher ed system. It is their faithless betrayal of their own gods that delivered them to the land of spineless slavery under those their intelligence once looked down upon

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