Відео

I'm a historian / pol sci phd type-thing - I might just go ahead and cite it just to get on the bandwagon.

There is so much pressure, because there are too many people who want those jobs. There is LITERALLY nothing that can be done to fix this. There are far too many people competing for so few spots in academia, and of course the most productive people will end up getting those spots.

Academia has become full of fake peple.

It is not abnormal for a professor to publish 10s of papers every year if they have a large research group. However, what does not sound realistic if they publish 100s papers every year, which is unrealistic for a human being to contribute to the work. What also unrealistic is to find young academics who utilize their network to participate in an awful lot of paper, without having / leading a research group. This raise concerns, specifically with exploiting ECRs under any umbrella or having a specific advantage to exploit their network. To cut a long story short, the academic environment is full of unethical behaviours, and it is the editors' job to be mindful and give a chance for ECRs. We live in TICK BOX world.

make a video on how to correctly study a research paper.. i think it is an underrated skill

I'm surprised at how stupid "smart" people are.

I am entering 4th, and presumably last, year of my PhD, so I am not an experienced researcher by any means (0 citations, btw), but I have felt very disconnected from most videos/posts about the issues with academia. As far as I can tell, it seems like a lot of people, when they say "academia", they actually mean "at my university" or in "academia in my city/country" or I would say most commonly at "a prestigious US university" (that does not obviously apply to the video). Few points about my experience as opposed to what the video or many of the commenters experience: - My supervisor is not on any of my papers, never implied he should be, nor has the supervisor of any of my colleagues afaik. - As a PhD student, I am not an employee, my supervisor has pretty much zero power over the likelihood of me finishing, and I am not paid from a grant (well, tbf I am not really paid, I just have a small stipend). - Having publication in a D1 journal (like Transactions on power systems) would more than satisfy journal publication requirements for any promotion at the uni and only few people have been able to accomplish that. - The number of citations is totally irrelevant here, and I don't get why plain number of citations is used as a metric for anything at any institution. - I have never seen anyone writing papers at the uni. I don't get why anyone would be at the uni when they don't have to (admittedly, nobody needs lab or special equipment, so everything can be done anywhere). - I have never seen the commonly expressed 'zombie syndrome' a lot of people talk about. Something along the lines of 'I/someone else looks totally exhausted all the time from all the grind I/they do because they work and write all the time'. I doubt that this is not the case at plenty unis in many, if not all, countries. There are plenty of issues in academia, like anywhere else, but I wager that many, perhaps even most, of the grudges people hold would disappear if they just went to a different institution with better environment/more appropriate to their capabilities.

It is simple economics. Incentives matter. Academia manuevered itself into an 'arms race' situation.

publishing papers - that is nothing new. In industry you will also find KPIs that are hard to achieve. BTW, in industry you will also work on the weekend and if you are a scientist in industry R&D, you will also find yourself writing abstracts and papers on the weekend besides you other activities. that is R&D. Everybody wants to be a part of it because otherwise they found their education / wasted time / wasted money obsolete

Papers.

Even eggheads don't like eggheads any more. They're just competition. So basically, in 2024, everyone h8t3s everyone else, not only in academia, but everywhere, all over the place. Thanks to the internet, we found out what was in everyone else's head and we didn't like it. You don't watch my videos or read my poems, so why should I read your papers... or watch your videos? It's equilateral h8tr3d.

Well, sorry, but I don't really agree with all this negativity and most definitely your career isn't how many papers you have published but really what you have done as an academic as a whole. I keep hearing that papers = your career, but my experience in 8 years in academia has shown very different things. I am also an academic and I genuinely believe everything you hope/wish for: that it is my unique skills that matter, and the unique things I brought to the academic circles in terms of skillsets, ideas, software, collaborations, or papers. I payed little attention to publishing papers in "high end" journals and I still got none such publication. Yet, here I am, I got a nice position in a decent university and I am internationally recognized in a broad community, exactly due to my unique skills and projects, and not my citation scores (which remain on the same level as your citation scores). In the university I got a position they make it clear, again and again, that "citation score", "h index", and all these other nonsensical indices, are not the most important thing. It is the individual that matters and the individual's novel ideas and/or skills and/or communication practices and/or exceptional teaching skills and/or many other things that make us stand out. I would imagine that for most universities this is the case. I was rather shocked to see you show us the promotion form from Manchester. This just looks like a toxic place to work at, maybe consider other places. I am in the UK, south west, if you want to have a look. :D Yes, the value of papers is decreasing, but the main reason for this is that there are much more scientists at the moment that there are good ideas to be done in research. Ugly but unavoidable truth. You can't have millions of PhD candidates, which is what we have right now, all doing ground breaking research, because there isn't enough such research to be done. Not because people won't read it. The amount of scientists has increased exponentially, yet the fundamental frontiers of science have not increase exponentially. So on average each paper has drastically less worth. And also, paper impact always has been and will be, on a logarithmic scale, so the majority of the 1000s of new papers being published right now will not be of high quality. That's how log scales work. And exactly because of the log scale, how many papers you publish will never be what matters. It is the impact of the papers. It is 1000 times better to have published 1 paper with 1000 citations (or some other objective proof of impact for your community that you can provide) than to have published 1000 papers with 1 citation each. In fact, none of the 7 places I worked at or had research visits at anyone cared about the number of papers you have published. People care about whether they had any measurable impact, which makes perfect sense. Citation is a decent proxy for impact, but not always accurate. That is why you always need to make your own case on how your work is impactful... This whole video is about the "number" of papers, instead of their impact, it gives me the idea of someone having deeply misunderstood what their job is about. Also, I found weird your section describing your paper on Transactions on Power Systems. Like how you "spent weeks on making the figures as good as possible, and the writing as clear and concise as possible". Well, yes, of course. This is not proof that your paper is impactful or that it should be. This is just standard practice. It should take you a good couple of months to write a paper, even with all the research done. You have a paper with 56 citations and another with 33 (at the moment). Surely, you can make a case that these two papers had positive and broad impact? These are both well-cited papers, and they've only been out for 3-4 years now. This citation number is uncommon, so while citation number is not a proof by itself, it is very likely that you can make a clear case that these two papers were very impactful. Why didn't you mention any of these papers? Do you truly see no impact? Perhaps this video is motivated more from your high expectation of a paper that you believed should have done well and it didn't, rather than the academic reality that not all papers can be of high impact. My take of the matter is: publish as much as you want, but if you publish a lot, don't expect everything to be of high impact. If you don't like publishing many papers with low impact then focus on getting out one paper every three years with as much impact as you can make it. Negotiate with your boss for this possibility, or write your own grant proposal if you have a brilliant idea that you believe will have impact.

Other people not caring about your work only about money. It happens everywhere unfortunately not just research

I've worked as a data analyst for 6 years and my bachelors was in Statistics. You brought up something which is pervasive in all industries and it's an over-use of metrics and the down playing of intuition for hiring or recognising patterns or talent. In business a smart person might be able to intuit something but now we spend hundreds of millions on metrics and dashboards most of which have little to no impact. Everyone is obsessed with quantities and numbers but nobody has the skills to actually see what is of worth. Sounds the same here, if you have one ground breaking paper... That should be worth 100 papers. I would argue the researchers engaging in this gamification are not real scientists and should have their credentials revoked. You may argue many do this because they have to, I would argue it shows a lack of integrity and they need to be made an example of. This is also a failure of journals if they are allowing people to publish so many papers with minimal or questionable impact. I would argue we need new journals which are much, much, much more stringent and do not allow people to do this.

Academia has become a joke

I'm a layman and came across your video It seems to you need to discuss the system of academia. The citation system is method of quantifying productivity. What you need to do is to find another method to find impact/value for a paper. Because let's face it, there has to be SOME system for ranking researchers, and calculating what value they bring to the table. The problem is that value of someone's research is qualitative in nature. I think all researchers should brainstorm an alternate way for academia to function. Academia ultimately has to kowtow to sales in the end, because otherwise who will provide them money? It will become like a charity situation where you're only getting money for free That is the ideal research environment, however it's not easy to create in the real world

The impact of the article is mainly personal. This is why most people don't care about citations. Why did you start the article in the first place? Was it to make an impact on others or on yourself? Research is a mix of personal fulfillment and impact on others. We aim to convince others that our research is good enough to be published. Once completed, one day people will be interested in your research. That's why we do collaborations. The problem is not in the declining values, but just in the metrics. People are more concerned about publishing than getting something relevant for themselves.

Hello sir. I have read that many PhDs in computer science get hired as research engineers/scientists at companies like Nvidia, Meta, Google, IBM etc. So isn't getting hired here a better option, than trying to become a professor ? But I know reality is not that cosy. What is the catch, if a PhD banks on getting into these companies ?

I have worked with one professor as consultant/coauthor. It always looked to me like good chunk of papers published are just accumulation of references. He would do a single study then bleed that data dry for as many papers as humanly possible, often creating basically duplicate works. All in all my humble opinion is that publishing in journals should go the way of dodo and changed with platforms such as ResearchGate. It would be much easier for anyone to follow developments in his field and also it could do away with "peer review" by introducing ability of all peers to be reviewers. Any article published can be in "grey zone" for up to ...3 months lets say, during which all researchers reading it can leave questions/comments etc and author can amend paper to fix any possible issues and address the questions. And some scoring system can be created, with weighting etc.

Academia is just another savage and greedy industry, and its rule is: you must bring money. It doesn't matter how good or bad your work is, all that matters is how profitable it is, how many grants do you bring, how many papers you can publish, etc.

ua-cam.com/users/live0oZi_zC3420?si=iPPw1ikJ2CrCY7x5 Somewhat tangential but I would highly recommend this video, it convinced me that researchers should try to publish papers seperate from journals in a less formal style that would allow actual diecussion or discourse, (hopefully) or just new areas of research that wouldnt normally be seen as valuable or interesting

Back in 2012, I had everything set up to start a doctoral program on electrical engineering, despite knowing all of these problems you explain in this video. In the end, I did not go for a doctoral program and went straight to an engineering career with a masters. And I'm having a blast, in my last 8 years i worked a lot with industry r&d and I feel my work is relevant and well rewarded.

I hope your papers would be as interesting and exiting as this video.

When the metric becomes the goal it seizes to be a good metric.

I think citation number is not as neural as it looks like, especially in the current publish atmosphere requiring literature review. Which means if you apply a popular method, there is no harm to cite its original and this causes a citation inflation. ADAM is an optimization method and its fundamental, so it's not surprising it has high citations.

I have been in the Academia for 9 years. I'm finishing my PhD, and my research is on Religious Communication, based on the Ecology of Communication and Ecology of Media theories. I have zero citations so far. But this is what I've learned: 1. You can approach the internet and the research community either as a stage or a repository. If you see it as a stage then you'll sacrifice your body and mental health to beat the algorithm, pursuit what people call "fame and success in the Academia" and please people who don't really make so much of a difference in your life. So I'd rather approach the internet as a repository, so I publish papers when I believe they're good enough to be submitted. It is there for anyone who wants to read it. I prefer to contribute to science than to become a star. 2. I've come a long way to understand that appreciation is fragile. You can be praised as much as you can, but when you do one little wrong, everything falls apart. I'm not buying it. This is not healthy. 3. My "audience" are my students. Even though I've grown to love writing papers as you mention in your video, I'm more concerned about their future after they graduate. So I'm constantly available to help them with their assignments and papers, though not as much to please publishers and the academic directory. By the way, my research is funded by the Brazilian government, so it's public domain. No publisher will profit from my work. I never pay journals to publish my work. Oh, and last but not least, as Bela Bartok said, "competition is for horses, not artists". Research is a form of art. Maybe I'm wrong about it all, but I've had so much better nights of sleep after realizing it all.

Another factor that isn't helping is the mad rush to mandating open access. This sounds great on the surface in that it makes it so the papers are available to ANYBODY forever, but when we dig a little deeper there's a conflict of motivations. In the old model journals would make their money by charging for access to their library of papers, so this incentivized them to collect high quality high impact work in a domain that would make access to their collection near mandatory for anyone in the domain. Now that open access has shifted the payment model to pay to publish it has completely removed the incentives the journals had to quality control the inputs. Now their incentive is to gather as many papers as possible as they make their money when someone publishes, not when someone buys a subscription. In fact they are perversely incentivized to LOWER standards as a paper that gets zero downloads and zero citations costs them near zero, while a popular paper costs them money to distribute. I believe that in 2-4 decades we're going to look back on this and see 'open access' as a key culprit in destroying publication standards.

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Academia is now a joke. We're talking 10-20% reproducibility. I was heavily discriminated against for being white and male and now command an insane hourly in the private sector because: results are results. Academia has no real marketable results in 2024 so it's all lies, and it's all funded by government. Take what you want and pay. If you're a professor or public researcher in 2024: you're a corrupt anti-empiricist.

What platform do you use to create figures please?

ACADEMIA AS A WHOLE IS COLLAPSING, INTERNET EXPLSED IT FOR WHAT IR REALLY IS, A GIANT PONZI SCHEME

It's unfortunate that smart people get lured into academia and then find out it's all midwits in a circlejerk.

There is obviously a problem in academia, but there is no reason to think your assessment of your paper's value is accurate. Maybe 4 citations is an accurate assessment of it's worth. How would any of us know otherwise ?

The thing is 99.9% of papers are useless, they don't help anyone. Sets of real world problems and introduced in papers barely intersects.

AI has been gathering massive fundings since a decade so it's not surprising that people are publishing and citing papers in that field.

Research is a cruel and inhumane world where bullying is at its top. Imagine working all your life to get into that field of work with a PhD, post-docs, papers and then, to end as a janitor because you do not get along with the mediocre politics who destroy careers. This is the reality of this world.

UA-cam randomly recommended your video . And it turns out you are skoltech student and currently I am sitting in Skoltech watching your video. What as pleasant surprise 😂❤

Years ago ONLY a true elite like Einstein could get a PhD. Now its a commercial system of just print n sell..The result of academic commerce rather than elite merit. Professors are contracted to print an X amount of papers REGARDLESS.

The smartest people in the world keep feeding this evermore hungry beast just to stay alive, but don’t care enough to try to stop it

it's incredibly heartbreaking to hear such things about academia. my dream has been for more than a year to become a mathematics researcher. countless hours I daydreamed about math and my future doing math research, so that's really demotivating to hear. my question is: is this a global phenomenon? I'd guess it is a fault of the economic system. however I didn't finish the video yet, so maybe he explained it. sorry if that's the case

And this is the science we're supposed to trust? Seems like politics and bureaucracy to me

Why do we do this? If we have too much papers being published, can't scientists use their invaluable skills someplace else? Maybe I'm being dumb here, but usually, I think, an engineer finds a paper by a scientist and manages to make new technology out of it. Can't we short circuit this?

Impact of midnight car traffic to physical and mental health of prebuescent elementary school students

Classic Economics 101. Value always beats volume in the long run. Value beats small-minded ego. For me, it's the journey, the process and the solution. But I'm at the end of my career, so I can have this luxury. Don't let volume distract you from value. Do the bitch run (i.e. the volume of basic papers), but keep working on the quality. Don't get ground down by this and don't lose your obvious passion.

You are limiting yourself with this attitude. I would not say you must stay in academia or that it is worth it, there is no glamour in sacrificing. Do what is better for youself. Nevertheless, if you want to succeed in academia, you know what you get do. You know the rules of the game (you just explained them). So, instead of complaining about them, just focus on doing what you are failing to do: promote your papers and get citations. Also I think that it is pretty fair that you are evaluated on the performance of your job. For academics, performance is scientific impact, measured by number of paper and citation. Just revisit your methods, talk to more experienced people and emulate them. I am sure if you want to succed and publish 8 papers and day a get a total of 3000 citations a year you can. But for sure, it will not be doing things the way you are doing now.

My conclusion: being successful is not easy to anyone! 🤯

Why does he kinda look like Saul Goodman's cousin?

That is because they are more worried about making a name for them than actual substance and value of what is being done.

In the 1970s we would say "publish or perish". It's not new.

I totally agree with you there must be a limit of number of papers that professors can do annually. Some professors have so many postdoctoral fellows and many collaboration with other colleagues in different countries they've published many paper that they have not read them. This is a type of cheating, and it is completely unacceptable. No scientists have the capacity to publish 20 papers per year except those kinds of people.