You ARE your publications
What does it do to us, our science, and our teams when we are reduced to our publication list?
Welcome back to the latest series on publications. A previous series, looking at leaving academia through the lens of Conscious Uncoupling, is not finished but on hiatus. Previous newsletters on publishing are here and here.
Early on in my faculty career, I would design lab T-shirts, and one of my favorites is shown below. The front had a joke about our science, while the back read “THE HASWELL LAB: Publishing in Scientific Journals since 2011”. This message was meant to be a joke: 2011 was four years after I’d started my tenure track position. Four years is a long time to go without a publication, at least as an R1 tenure-track professor in my field.
If I’m being honest (and if I’m not, what are we even doing here??), I was trying to make light of a very painful wound with these T-shirts. The pain came from being judged on something at which I demonstrably did not excel, could not entirely control, and did not really value.
Being under-published
Part of the pain of being reduced to my publications was that 1) I was what I like to call “under-published” and 2) was knowing that it was hurting my career.
I had one peer-reviewed first author primary research paper from my thesis work, and one from my postdoc. There were some other papers in there (reviews and commentaries, and a second author paper from my PhD work) but in terms of solid first author contributions—two papers was it when I was looking for a faculty position.
That I would be judged for not publishing well early in my career wasn’t a surprise to me—it’s not exactly an industry secret that publications are the currency of science. But I had a very idealistic view of publishing as a graduate student, and I thought that I had good reasons for my paper deficit—mostly that I had chosen challenging projects that took time to develop. (I never considered that I also needed to develop better project planning and paper writing skills).
I thought that others would understand my excuses, and was shocked to receive feedback from multiple sources that my meager publication record had hurt my chances at early career fellowships and job applications. For a while I thought I might not get a tenure track job. But after multiple years of job searching, I finally landed a great faculty position, which I chalk up to a cool project, a top-notch academic pedigree, and a department willing to take a chance on me.
Freaking out
Another part of the pain of being seen as my publication list was that, even if I had been prioritizing and strategizing, generating publishable papers was not entirely in my control.
After four years of running my own lab, I hadn’t published a thing. I was, by this point, freaking out. I was idealistic but I wasn’t an idiot; I knew that we needed to get some papers into press for me to get tenure. But I was dependent on my students and postdocs to get publishable data, exciting results, and quickly.
This is one of the most terrible aspects of being an academic scientist—you mentor and you extract work from the very same people. Your career advancement depends heavily on the productivity of young people, people you are are supposed to be training up. There are kind ways to do this, and there are cruel ways to do this, but there will always be some conflict of interest.
Get some ding-dang papers out!
Finally, it was painful to feel reduced to my publications by my colleagues, whom I thought had hired me based on my creativity and collegiality.
Every year the senior faculty in my department meet and discuss the progress of junior people with an eye towards helping them craft the best possible tenure case. Then, the chair meets with each assistant or associate professor and conveys the content of the meeting both in person and in a written letter. It’s a great system.
One annual meeting with the chair produced one of the most painful memories I have of my pre-tenure life. My research group was asking exciting questions (IMHO) and learning to use the right techniques, I had funding right away, and I had recruited some great people. I’d been teaching some new classes and was giving a lot of talks. I was aware that publications would be the weakest part of my tenure package, and so I showed up brandishing a spreadsheet that outlined my plan to get everything we were working on written and published before my tenure package went out for external letters.
I am sure that the chair walked through everything on my CV, as I have a hard copy letter that details what was in the conversation. But all I remember hearing was, “get some ding-dang papers out.” (I’m paraphrasing a little). Now, with the calm of distance and my added years of experience, I know that my colleagues were trying to help me get tenure, and that they were right about what I needed to do in order to get it. But it felt like all of our scientific progress, everything I’d done for the department, all the ways I’d been a teacher and a mentor and a colleague, didn't matter-and that the only way to demonstrate my value as a faculty member would be to produce more publications.
A distortion
Why this long personal history? Because these experiences illustrate so many of the problems associated with reducing a person to one aspect of their CV. It’s convenient and efficient, of course. But by allowing a publication list to represent a person’s quality and performance, we distort so much. We make getting publications the same as doing research, which it is NOT. We ignore the complex aspects of collaboration, mentoring, project development, and paper writing (not to mention the biased and deeply flawed aspects of scientific publishing itself). And we reduce the value of all the other things we do as faculty.
Reducing a person to their papers twists our relationship to our science, to our jobs, and to our students and postdocs. And we should stop doing it.
Discussion Section
What does it do to a person to have everything be about papers?
How does it twist our relationship to our science?
How does it influence the way we mentor our students and postdocs?
“How does it twist our relationship to our science?” Well, as you point out, it certainly creates terrible incentives for corner cutting and sloppiness. We’re only a week out from the president of Stanford university resigning because at least 5(!) papers from his research group had to be retracted due to concerns about scientific validity and data manipulation. He was deemed unaware of the specifics, but I *guarantee* he created an intense atmosphere of “get it done, I don’t care how, and I don’t want to know the details.” That is the dirty secret of how some huge labs somehow miraculously maintain multimillion dollar NIH funding for 30-40 years: ruthlessness. And when the findings inevitably fall apart, it seriously hurts science. The public loses trust in research, lots of money was wasted investigating dead ends, were farther behind looking for cures, terrible
The same mentality prevails in literary studies. I should note that longer review periods post COVID really hurt younger faculty. When I was just starting out, I had some desk rejections for essays that were later published. It’s frustrating when something so important is so subjective and often beyond your control.