Comments on: Too Much of a Good Thing

By: John

John — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:32:29 +0000

Ginny – this piece was meant to cover only the experimental “hard” sciences. I was a double major in Slavic Linguistics for a while, and I do marketing for a living now, so I had no pretense of making this applicable beyond physics, chemistry, biology, and a few other disciplines. I’d be interested to hear a historian’s or a linguist’s take on this.

Scholarship is a different beast than research, and books are more important to scholars than to researchers. By the time a monograph hits the press in my field, it’s already out of date.

By: Ginny

Ginny — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 16:11:58 +0000

Another factor: In some disciplines (say, linguistics) books are rare and articles are important; in others (say history) books are more common. Within a discipline scholars know these differences, but sometimes it affects understanding (you can “know” things but can’t help bringing your own discipline’s assumptions with you) at the dean level.

Obviously, the publish/perish has encouraged relatively superficial scholarship in more cases than most would like to admit. It has also led many to devalue teaching.

By: Gorgasal

Gorgasal — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 14:23:26 +0000

John - I recently saw a high energy physics paper with over 1,600 authors. Take a look here. The very first paper I just downloaded had more than 200 authors.

By: John

John — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 13:37:35 +0000

Jim – have you seen the author lists on the supercollider papers? Some of them approach 100 names. I think that the janitor slipped his name into one or two of them.

By: Jim Miller

Jim Miller — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 13:22:52 +0000

Some time ago, I read an article describing just how far this had gone in medical research. After two authors, adding more authors to a paper is costless to the other authors. (For one author, the citation will be to Smith, for two, Smith and Jones, and for three or more, Smith, et. al.)

As a consequence, everyone who was in the building when the research was done might have their names added to the author list. This had some amusing results from time to time. Some researchers became “authors” of papers they had never even read. Others became “authors” of separate papers that came to opposite conclusions.

Not sure just what the solution is to this problem, though eliminating tenure (something I favor for other reasons) might be a good first step.

(And paying more attention to the problems caused by those “pathological personalities” might help, too.)