These are some good ideas - we DEFINITELY need more INDEPENDENT research
jobs in science - this is a HUGE problem. I would start there before
deciding to reduce the number of PhD's earned. The problems science
solves will not go away, in general, so we will always need more
independent thinkers employed to solve them.
A couple of ideas for peer review:
1) make the reviewers names available: ie: not anonymous.
2) make the author(s) names anonymous. Too many papers get published
and grants get funded because of WHO is on the author/PI line rather
than the content of those documents.
Aaron T. Dossey, Ph.D.
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
(Candan Soykan) wrote:
I believe that the problem is much broader than individuals "cheating" the
peer review system. Rather, why has the number of manuscripts increased so
dramatically? Many bemoan the increasing quantity and decreasing quality of
papers these days, and yet few are willing to discuss the root cause -
competition for jobs/grants. So long as there are too many individuals
vying for too few jobs/research dollars, the incentive will be to publish
often, even if the quality of the work is low (i.e., satisfy the search
committees and reviewers who value quantity over quality).
There are several ways to address this issue (and I doubt that my list is
exhaustive):
1) Increase the number of jobs/grants for ecologists;
2) Decrease the number of ecologist we train so as not to exceed the number
of jobs/grants that are available;
or
3) Change the way we evaluate candidates to better reflect the quality of
the work they have done, rather then just reward output per se.
In my opinion, option #1 is largely out of the hands of researchers;
moreover, if the amount of funding did increase, there is always the risk
that the number of ecologist we train would as well, leading to no net gain.
I have seen certain individuals refrain from taking students, fulfilling
the second option above, but getting a whole community of ecologists to do
it seems problematic (who would decide how many students each researcher can
train?). The third option seems the most realistic, but will require a
shift in the way we evaluate research productivity. Moreover, it brings
with it risks as well - counting pubs is, at the very least, objective,
whereas who is to evaluate the quality of the work done by an applicant?
I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this issue ...
Candan Soykan
[email protected]
