Re: What have they been up to with all that money?

Aging_Recycled_Scientist wrote:
In the journals I am familiar with, I have noticed a couple of trends,
particularly in the more prestigeous journals: 1) an increase in the
number of authors per publication

That's particularly the case with large projects, such as particle accelerator labs. I think the most authors on a paper from one such facility was over a hundred.

2) an increase in the content and
quality of the articles. Simply, in my opinion over the last 20 year
in order to publish one must produce a much more weighty manuscript
requiring a more man-hours and experiments.

Not necessarily. I knew of a prof who managed to take one set of data and produce three papers from it: half the data in one, the other half in another, and half the data from each of these papers to produce a third. I read them and they said essentially the same thing but appeared, as I recall, in three different journals and/or proceedings.

He could have written one really good paper from it but that wouldn't have helped his publication record as much as three.

If the major peer-
reviewed journals is all that were used as a measure, that explains
the skew in the logic of the report. I would suggest there are only
so many pages, editors and major peer reviewed journals, and capacity
for publication. Instead I would suggest that the growth if any has
been absorbed in the 2nd and 3rd rate journals, where they also have
increased the quality factors needed in order to pass the peer
review.

Would that also mean that there would be an increase in new journals being started to allow the extra papers to be published or would that be done on-line instead?

In short, it has simply become much harder to publish,
especially without a large cadre of research assistant professors,
post-doctoral research associates and graduate students. It has
become harder too to get a grant without a heck of a lot preliminary
data.

Or affiliation with either an academic institution or corporation.

It is a system that favors more of the large labs run by a few
older scientific managers, and disfavors bringing into the
professional fold newly minted scientists.


Or lone researchers with good ideas but few financial resources.
.

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