People like you are giving importance to ieee, and they are doing nepotism, most of the journals are based on name of the fellow, what work you have done and who have reviewed it, depends on it, give name of fellow and get your paper acceptes in ieee. Do you think you know everything on the published paper?

Una cosa es publicar n cantidades y pagar las altas tasas para publicar y otra cosa es publicar calidad y la aplicación de todo el conocimiento que abarca el tema de investigación

Academic output sounds to me like an oversaturated market. Similar to the Indygame market. There are a lot of high quality contributions, much much more than 15 years ago. The skill level went up steeply, also due to better tools. But most of those productions are not sustainable as they grab the limited attention from each other in market awareness, making only a few games bubble to the top, and leaving the majority of games as financial flops. In the end, its a battle for awareness.

Like in boxing, the academics should have a promoter/agent that tries to optimize the paper writing and fundraising side.

This was great, cheers

“Attention is All You Need” is up there in the number of citations

Once you land a job, you will have to start chasing fundings. From that point and on, nobody cares about the number of citations or number of papers you wrote. Funding agencies care about what you propose and what you deliver, on time, on budget (often sadly the name value of the institution you belong to). You will be in Resaerch Business. Publishing peer reviewed papers would be nice but your presence, presentations, participation and activities in the tech societies could help you get where you want to be--i.e., do both. Best of luck to you!

Not sure how anyone can expect someone to remain in academia when the entire system is geared towards keeping you on short term contracts, measuring the amount of funding you bring in and papers you publish. This is no way to live.

Should be titled, the declining academia in academia.

Your paper has about average citation frequency for this journal. Impact factor is the number of citations over a two-year period. Your paper is about 4. The journal's impact factor is about 4. This is normal. Solid, reputable technical journals have about this impact factor. These journals are in the minority, actually. Most journals that exist in the world are far below that. One suggestion I can give you (as a professor in applied physics who has published 50+ papers and written or substantially edited most of them) is the following. Make the paper writing process part of your research. The writing and preparing figures is not lost time. You analyse and scrutinise your results while you are working on the paper. (As another commenter has put it, "Keep writing. Writing is thinking.") Also, papers may come out slowly in the early years of one's research career. This becomes easy and more routine down the road. Collaborations are often (but not always!) useful for research and can turbo-charge it, as you correctly observe. Also, you should critically consider if the research career is the best option for you. You are thinking about some of the right things now. Consider industry or other types of highly-qualified jobs as viable career alternatives. At least, you should make the research career a conscious rational choice, after considering all the effects it may have on you and your family over your life span.

Who review the reviewers?

i see you are frustrated. may be shoulda have a normal job?

3d visualisations? Vomit

I think this video is mostly about your own thoughts. The title of the video questions the value, but the first table of the application would support the value. At 3:19, you either draw the wrong conclusion or misread. It specifically says emergent and quality. Not quantity, as you claim. (And you skip the second bullet point.) Your skill isn't for some person to judge, or for some back-slapping friend to approve without judging. If they support your promotion, they want your output to support their decision. (However, I would say that most hires and promotions are about who you know and not about what you know to a great extent, in all fields. So if you care about the same things as your friends and colleagues, why not hang out and find out what more you have in common?) I didn't go on to see if you arrived at the conclusion, because I think you started with the wrong assumption. I think you have to think of it this way: If a person or committee are to promote me over other candidates, how can they know I deserve it over those others, and how can they defend their decision in a reasonably objective way?

ohhh. I did a PhD in Material Science at University of Manchester. Now I am software developer. Lol

I think it is important to love your research field and gain joy from the advancement of the entire field and pushing the boundary of human knowledge

The key is implementation science; the value of your academic output is now measured in direct proportion to their IMPACT. Funding is contingent upon either your ability to be cited highly, it's thankfully isn't related to your ability to publish in highly ranked journals. Although publishing in high impact factor journals necessarily means your citation index will be high. However, your output is also dependent on patent applications, spinouts, how much funding you bring in, i.e. demonstrating your research output is useful. It's the world we live in, adapt or die (figuratively of course).

It was either Peters or Demming that said that as long as a corporation is counting things as an evaluation of its employees, it will continue to lose its place in the market. Fast-forward to today, and we see that those big corporations that did not embrace some sort of genuine process improvement program are no longer big corporations. Ironically, considering your situation, the last three big bastions of commerce who have yet to make that embrace are: academia, finance, and medical care. All three areas are in trouble! Banks are failing, health care is pricing itself out of the market and quality of care continues to diminish. And lastly, the pillars of academia have been shaking for awhile now. University graduates do not have the necessary skills to meet the demands of corporate America; these students are weak in nearly all the areas covered by STEM, and particularly math. The dumbing down of America is taking a huge toll on our society. The biggest nail in the coffin is the upper level of college and university administration; it is a boy's club, no women allowed! This group of mostly men has been trying to control the gender of who gets PhD's in the hard sciences for many decades, and fortunately, it is an attitude that is no longer being accepted by most of the societies on the planet. I have been a college instructor for over twenty years, and my advice to you is to find some smart little upstart of a company that could really benefit from your skills and expertise, and who would reward you for helping it grow as you grow with it. In the long run, that sort of experience is going to mean more to you than any little raise you might see in a paycheck from your university. You need to get out of academia before the floor drops out from beneath you altogether! Academia is broken; It is not the safe, warm cocoon you might envision it to be.

Making an impact in a corporation requires the same factors: Earning the attention other brilliant people, putting many more great ideas out there, and adjusting your objectives and means to stay relevant. It’s no easier here unless you’re just using your skills that in an order-taking role.

I am not a scientist but from my limited point of view, it seems that academia rewards quantity of publication too much but gives no incentive to review the many research papers published. And so, too much crap is being published without being reviewed.

I remember having to rewrite my topic analysis four times before it was accepted. It had to be sufficiently different from any other work. Now the opposite is true "Yes our topic is the same as Jennings et al - except we are increasing variable X by 0.1% and redoing those tests" (But we are going to give X a new name "Hyper X" or "Nu-X" and change the title of the paper accordingly)

Seems like the publishing maschine is the model to emulate. Young academics should collaborate more. If two people get together, they can write the same number of papers with a little less effort and the more the model spreads, the fewer worthless papers people have to read.

Very informative, thanks. These incentives look perverse, pushing investigators to focus on irrelevant work.

Fundamentally I agree with you. But I have something to add: Research is fun. Working day after day on a hard problem is very interesting and a lot of people want to do it. More then we as a society currently are willing to have the budget for. So some kind of mechanism must exist that allocates the limited research positions to the many people wanting in. I for myself have not even started a PhD though I was offered a very interesting position. Because I did not want to compete this much. I also have no real answer on how to do it, I just wanted to emphasize that this mechanism unfortunately is necessary.

Is this true in the best of the and top academic places? in places like these the older or the people who are leading are generally smart or sensible, they have better work to do than promoting paper writing coz they have their own theory or any kind of problem to solve(the problem consumes their mind) I think the art of solidifying your work by writing papers is very good in this era, it's a definite success you can say ...if it was an issue let's say 50-70 years ago, Academia as an industry is good now, its high time we move on from this quickly now that we have established standards by having this paper writing. If writing good and more papers was a goal in the previous century, now it's time to go back to the previous generation theme of problem solving being important

I wrote a monograph for my PhD. Papers are overrated.

I would assume that most of the people citing this paper never read the paper. Adam is just the standard optimization algorithm in deep learning and is integrated in every deep learning library. People just use it without even knowing how exactly it works and they mention it in their papers. So obviously is gets cited a lot. I doesn't matter at all how well written the paper is in this case.

If everything in science must be novel, then you can't discuss things once published unless you invent something else. Its almost an incentive to don't pay attention to others. Sometimes I search for papers for try doing exactly the opposite and invent something novel :c

incentives drive everything, formula get 40 papers for senior lecturer, 60 Associate Prof, 80-100 for full Prof, who cares about quality or whether they even edited the paper. Admins like this because they need to count and it looks like they bring in research money (doesn't have to be true).

I hope you count your views as important feedback . Try to be different and people will need you, and more than papers. Thanks for your useful talk !

good. It should be like that, lovecraftian stuff technically can have a gorillian authors, but only the bangers r considered "canon" so to speak, same should be here, if its a banger it will spread like magic, like THE BOOK or DA BOOK depending on the mood when we make it.

Sorry about that. I hope you can improve your career soon. Thank you for sharing!

paper inflation

Declining value of academia

Depends on fields. Machine learning (deep learning) papers are much much easier to garner citations because of the popularity, while in reality, the actual “research” in it is very limited, they are merely presentations of work flows that just happen to produce useful results.

People are writing papers just for the sake of writing them nowadays. There's too many PhD students and hardly any of them actually have an idea to pursue. We publish millions of papers each year and perhaps a dozen of them are worthwhile contributions to science. Look back at history, I'm fairly sure if I listed every single publication that had a major impact on science, that list would be less than 1,000. So what are all these papers for?? They are for getting doctorates and paychecks. I don't blame the authors. Academia as a whole is twisted so far out of shape. It's been turned into a business. Institutions are stuck on the hamster wheel. If they ever stop publishing new papers they will lose their funding, researchers will be laid off.

How different is it for the pure math papers? From what I know, pure math research are very esoteric so I would guess its rare for them to get many citations.

great, insightful video

One point missing in "what to do": have a serious and democratic discussion in the academic community to talk about these issues. As already highlighted, things can evolve even worse and AI will have a key role in the context of producing papers. The system must change or distortions will become too big to be handled properly

Great research mindset but not great money making mindset, unless you have significant financial backing. Some institutions have more money and thus, the researchers are more free. Some research universities have less and the need to find ways to bring in more money.

Can scientist become billionaire??

This whole paper storm has always bamboozled me. I did a PhD in engineering at one of the "best ranked" unis in the world. On top of that I always liked the teaching "duties" and quickly got some of the highest student ratings ever given for "excellence in teaching" (don't want to brag, but this relevant to the story). I started getting annoyed because everyone assumed that I would become a professor. But the paper pressure kinda took all the fun out of my work. I was of the opinion that our system was deeply flawed and we should only peer-review-publish findings that are truly contributing in a major way. The race to just pump out papers is insane. I generally hate writing and especially if I feel what I have to say isn't really worth it. I have still have some threads in academia and collaborate here and there and act as co-examiner for PhD theses that suit my background, through which I end up co-author. So by now my h-index is kinda impressive, because I am part of many high-impact publications, from "Nature" to similar journals, but if you look closely you see that I have not authored more than a few paragraphs in soon a decade. The whole system is rotten and I have no clue where we are headed. No where great I assume.

lmao post docs are still like high school just cheat off each other and win popularity contest

Since the academic culture is "publish or perish", those who were able to game the system became successful much faster (and with much ease) than truly honest hardworking researchers. Now you will see papers published in OA journals with 7-10 authors each coming from different countries. There are so so so many dubious fake data papers. Even some are outright so stupid that they break the law of thermodynamics, yet the journal editors don't care when it's reported to them.

Yeah the only ones that matter are math but here's the thing. Chatgpt cN connect other research papers for ideas and information

Thanks for sharing your experience

Hello in the future i want to be a quantum Physicist i am still in high school tho i just wanted to ask how am i supposed to make contributions to science if now one cares about papers how are you supposed to share your breakthroughs? And are there still places that give you time to publish papers that actually improves are knowledge and where academics have more freedom to work on projects or something else?

Thank you for keeping this discussion rolling! In my experience these issues are not homogeniously distributed. It depends on the country, the institution and also the field. As a rule of thumb I would say that the more money is involved, the more competitive and toxic the research environment gets. What I personally find interesting is that the big publications (in high impact journals) in my field usually don't really help me to progress with my own research. I often rely on "smaller" publications which are more dedicated toward the experimental details and openly discuss the remaining problems. This alone shows me that metrics are not the best way to evaluate a researcher. Sir Paul Nurse (a Nobel Laureate) once used a military analogy by saying that the researchers at the forefront might push a field to a new direction but often leave a mess behind which need to be sorted out by other researchers (repeating experiments, double checking, using other mehtodology etc.). We tend to overvalue the frontier scientists (most awards and public fame is directed to those) but we don't really appreciate the footwork by the majority of scientists who sort things out. Therefore, many scientists chase these metrics even after they are already set and got their tenure - making it insanely difficult for younger people to get a piece of the cake as well. The only way out is when scientists themselves - meaning those who already have some power - break this cycle and go back to what science actually is about. I am glad that more and more people in the community at least acknowledge this problem and openly resist this absurdity.

Excellent!

Low hanging fruit has been picked. Now only those with great reach, beyond even some of the most intelligent people you may know, can bring something of value I think this is a good thing