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Nautilus has an interesting rundown on how scientific fraud happens and what could possibly be done to correct it written in comic book form. It's a fun little read and oh so true.
The book that it is based on, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, is worth reading as well.
Stuart Ritchie is a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King's College London. His new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, explains the ideas in this comic, by Zach Weinersmith, in more detail, telling shocking stories of scientific error and misconduct. It also proposes an abundance of ideas for how to rescue science from its current malaise.
How many Soylentils here are in academia? Have you felt the pressure of "publish or perish"?
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Saturday August 01 2020, @02:53PM (6 children)
From your example I would say it sounds plausible. After all her boss doesn't care since he isn't doing any data-work/wrangling anymore, that is all done by the underlings. So however long it takes, how mundane and repetitive it is is of no importance to him. In some cases they probably believe that it's the way it should be, they had to do it eons ago and now the next generations should do it to so that they can some day in the future make their underlings do it for them. It's the circle of academic life.
Working in academia, mainly in research only, I can tell you that having lots of underlings is probably a prestige matter but it's probably also very field or subject dependent. Some fields just lend themselves to having more research- and lab-assistants and phd-students then others so it's not something that goes everywhere. There might also be big country/university differences, where I am now most professors (etc) don't have more then one phd-student each (most dont even have one, but to become a professor you more or less must have had phd-students under you) and assistants are usually shared between multiple projects and groups or only employed for limited time periods. Financing is an issue, so if you can pull multi-million-$ grants then sure you can splurge on having your own academic-posse. But it's unlikely that the university will pay you to have them around just so you'll feel important.
That said I'm not sure there is a difference here between academia and the private sector. All management or bosses are always judged on their underlings, having more is better or more prestigious etc.
But the overall name of the game is to publish papers, lots of them, and get them cited by others. Both are important criteria for your promotion up the academic ladder. So having a lot of assistants and researchers is an easy way to accomplish this, they can attach their names to your work and you can attach yours to their work. Another option is to get into weird little sub-field and start pushing out multiple papers per year on more or less the same topic -- you just update or try and apply different perspectives and such. It's a great way to get your own citation numbers up as you can then cite all your previous papers -- citation inflation.
It's all quite fucked up and far from how people outside academia believe it works, but the day of you being able to sit in your ivory tower and publish like a paper every five years or so are gone, for most people. Now it is almost like a paper-factory and publish or perish is a real thing. If you don't publish you better be one hell of a teacher that the students love, or you better be getting multi-million-$ grants all the time otherwise you are eventually going to get axed and tenure, which is over all getting more and more rare, is not in your career path.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @03:50AM (5 children)
My secret is that I love teaching the classes they hate and none of my colleagues are qualified to judge the quality of my published work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @04:50AM (4 children)
(Pssst noone cares)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @07:55AM (3 children)
You cared enough to reply.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:36PM (2 children)
(Only to tell you the painfully obvious)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @08:19PM (1 child)
Doesn't change the fact that you cared enough. Twice now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @01:12AM
(OK you win - tell us about why you like teaching again)