!VAR HAGENDOORN

The Bubble in Academic Publishing

The world of academics has become an industry just like any other, with its own bubbles and its own form of inflation.

Academic publishing for example has completely spun out of control. How many academic journals are there? I think 10,000 would be a conservative estimate. And the number is growing year by year. Some journals are published on a quarterly basis, others bimonthly, monthly or even weekly. This means that every month thousands of papers get published. But after being peer-reviewed and published most of these papers are never ever read again.

Most universities require academic staff to publish a minimum average number of papers per year. This publish or perish regime means that researchers endlessly recycle their ideas, distribute the results of a single experiment over multiple publications, mine their data to see if they can wrest a publication out of it, even when the experiment was a failure, publish papers even when they’ve got nothing to say and have their name added to the list of authors just because they happen to occupy an office in the same corridor. Heads of departments routinely have their name added to papers by PhD students, post-docs and other staff members without even reading the paper.

All of these papers have to be peer reviewed. What this means is that someone working in the same field at another institute checks whether the paper fits into the current methodology, not whether it is any good let alone interesting. This way erroneous research paradigms get perpetuated for years and when it turns out that a certain methodology was wrong everyone gets to hide behind the fact that they were doing the same thing as everyone else. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

To give an example, in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to describe processes of cultural evolution. As far as I’m concerned it is a redundant nonsense concept because there are other more parsimonious ways of describing and modelling the same phenomenon. Anyway, the concept was mostly ignored for more than a decade but then during the early nineties it suddenly became a huge hype and in 1997 the peer reviewed journal of memetics was launched. The journal has since folded, as it turned out that there’s only so much research you can do with a metaphor.

If you want to convince yourself of the folly of academic publishing (and research), have a look at these journal lists, here, here or here.