I saw 2-3 posts here in the last few days, and I am getting very disappointed in the trajectory of our community (meaning academia in general). High school kids wanting to publish??

No offense to anyone, but they can’t possibly have the scientific knowledge to create actual publishable work. I don’t know about social sciences, but in STEM I know they don’t have the mathematical tools to be able to comprehend what would be needed. Obviously there are geniuses and exceptions, but we are not talking about these cases.

I am very scared about where this will lead. We first started with academics wanting more and more papers, so some publishing institutions lowered their standards and start to ask for more money. Nowadays even in reputable journals work is not replicable because its massed produced, and the review process does not involve replicating the work (because of course it doesn’t, why would I spend a month of my life replicating something for free).

So if this happens I will not be surprised even one bit if high school students start with some help getting publications, then semi-predatory publishers catch on to this, and the standards are lowered further, and everyone follows suit.

I am overall very disappointed with the dependence of academic progress to paper publishing and how that leads to the demise of actual academic work. I was in a committee to assign funding to new PhD students, and this year I couldn’t believe my eyes… two of the candidates (students that had just finished their master’s) had Nature publications (one was Nature Neuroscience and the other Nature Biology). I don’t doubt for a moment that those kids are super bright and will make great scientists, but come on. A Nature publication before starting a PhD?

Dirac had 60 papers in his life. Bohr about 100. I’ve seen quite a few early level academics (AP’s and a case of a postdoc as well) that have more than that. This doesn’t make sense. And now colleges will require a couple of publications to give a scholarship or something??

Many of you might disagree and that is ok, but in my opinion a paper should say something new, something important, and contain all the information to replicate it. In my opinion 90% of current papers do not fill those criteria (many of my own included, as I too am part of this system. One has to do what they have to do in the system they are in if they want to eat.).

Sorry for the rant. I would much prefer to do 6 papers in my career spending 5 years in each than do 150 spending a month and a half in each. I really really wish this trend of high schoolers trying to publish does not catch on.

Ideally tomorrow all publishers would start to reject 90% of the papers and employ with actual pay people to do very comprehensive reviews. Maybe even add the name of the reviewer in the paper as a contributor or something. But it ain’t happening.