There is a huge pressure from universities to publish. Sometimes they have these rules that you need to publish a certain amount of papers every year. It’s becoming like a sort of popularity contest. Do you think this is distracting? Do you think there should be a different model? In the past, it used to be different.

There is a huge pressure from universities to publish. Sometimes they have these rules that you need to publish a certain amount of papers every year. It’s becoming like a sort of popularity contest. Do you think this is distracting? Do you think there should be a different model? In the past, it used to be different.

Sabine Hossenfelder is an author and theoretical physicist working on the foundations of physics. To be more precise she describes herself as a phenomenologist rather than a theorist. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she leads the Superfluid Dark Matter group. She is the author of ‘Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray’, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology. More importantly she’s an outstanding science communicator, who has attracted a huge audience on her YouTube channel, where she publishes explanatory videos on topics related to physics.

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SH. Yes, so it’s certainly a bad development. I’m not entirely sure which universities you’re referring to. I am aware that especially [academia in] the United Kingdom does these research evaluation exercises like in regular intervals. I know that researchers in, I think China, and some other countries they are actually paid a bonus if they published a paper in a big journal, that kind of thing. So these are those are really, really bad ideas. What is this?

SL. I got what you’re talking about, I had it open. So if you publish in Nature, in 2016, they [Chinese universities] would pay you $43,000 for a paper in Nature.

SH. Well, that’s interesting. Though, I read recently, I think it was in Nature news or something that they’re thinking about doing something about it. Yeah, it’s clearly a bad idea. I mean, look, we all know what the result is, like, people will try to publish something that’s catchy, doesn’t really matter if it’s wrong or right. They try to get it into a big journal and hope that no one notices if it’s not the best research. This is happening all the time. So it just sets entirely the wrong incentives.
To some extent, I have to say that in the traditional fields, we’re kind of lucky that journals like Nature and Science, tend to not publish papers about the foundations of physics, because at least that’s a problem which we don’t have.

Generally, the idea that you can evaluate research by very simple numbers, like counting the number of papers, or the number of papers that have been published in this other journal, or the number of citations and so on, it’s like complete nonsense.

Then, and I’m not only just seeing this, there are lots of papers that have been written about it in fields like it’s also sociology of science, scientometrics, and so on. People are discussing better measures for scientific impact. Actually this research, evaluation exercise or whatever it’s called, I think they don’t use quite as dumb measures as that. That’s a little more diversity in that, which I think is a good thing. But it’s still a problem, like people pay a lot of attention to how many citations they get, where they can publish their papers. The result is that they tend to focus on certain research questions that will allow you to do that and that’s typically stuff that a lot of other people also work on. And that just contributes to this streamlining effect, where people continue to do the same thing over and over again.