There was a thread on the Twitters today complaining about graduate students being called trainees.
The conversation went in all of the usual directions.
Because, of course, the “hot take” is correct. We have increased the number of post-graduate trainees in doctoral granting programs so as to obtain cut-rate labor to service our biomedical science research laboratory work. Yes. Absolutely.
To service the work that our federal government is asking us to do, and paying us to do, via the NIH, NSF and a few other major grant-making entities.
Grants to not-for-profit Universities and Research Institutes are, of course, a way for the US federal government to try to get cut-rate labor to service its goals. By leveraging the power of calling middle management “Professors” to justify underpaying us for the job we are doing. (“Underpaying” is a concept I have on good authority from practically every academic I’ve spoken with about their satisfaction with their compensation.)
Getting back to the pre-doctoral exploit, however, their is this notion of a valuable credential being dangled as the additional compensation. The award of the PhD (and the presumed training that comes with it) is supposed to make up for any perceived deficiencies in month to month paychecks. And it does have value. This credential is necessary for many subsequent job categories that are perceived as being desired. Or at least more desired than the jobs that are available, or the compensation that is available, for those without this particular credential.
My question for today is, would things be better in academic science if, instead of the credential model we operated on the peformance based, resume building model?
Everyone enters this pipeline as a fresh faced bachelor’s degree recipient and gets paid as a real employee on technician wages. Just like our current tech class. From there on, advance to the first supervisory step (like the current postdoc stage) depends merely on performance, opportunity and drive. If you just put in your time, you stay a tech. And move up on that trajectory. If you take an interest in the broader science issues and do more than just put in your hours under direction of the higher-ups, more like what we expect out of current graduate students, well, at some point you are competitive for the entry level manager position. And you get some techs to direct.
Then again, if you want to move up to the next level, junior faculty-ish we can say, you have to produce. You have to produce and show you can “run a team and act in all ways like a PI save name” and….boom. You get to be PI.
From there, if you take the extra time to also teach classes, since we’re going to have the adjunctification of traditional teaching duties rolled into this re-alignment of course, maybe you eventually earn the title of Professor. If we still have that.
At every stage, the key is that you are more or less expected to be able to make a career at that stage if that is what fits you. Techs can remain techs. Job longevity. Steady raises. Benefits. Low level managers…ditto.
Look you still have to perform. Every workplace has turnover for competence and for fit. But then again I see checkout folks at my local Costco that I’ve seen there for well over two decades. Same job, presumably with incremental raises. No need to constantly run upward merely to stay in your job.
And I assume there are those who I saw two decades ago who have moved up in managerial tracks either within Costco or in some other retail business.
What would it look like if we de-credentialed academic science?
The first (I think) season of The Expanse space drama teevee show had a small sideline of something that I think I recall enough from similar fiction to be a trope. The show has the class element built into it, especially in that first season. There are rich people on the space station and poor people. The masses struggle to survive, live dirtily and envy the people living above them who they have to knuckle under to.
Resources are finite (unlike a Star Trek type of show, or even Star Wars) and of course the control of these resources is used to further oppress the masses and bend them to the will of the elite.
Well, one of those resources in this particular show is oxygen.
A pretty big deal, of course, when the only known place with an excess of this element that is essential to life is back on Earth. Now, perhaps in some space drama situations the supply of air IS like the trolley problem. A very direct sort of “If I get the oxygen, you die and vice versa” does pop up but usually this is within the trope of self-sacrifice. Like Jack and Rose and that damn door in the Titanic blockbuster.
But the better situation is the one in The Expanse where the rich people could just sort of lean out the oxygen for the poor people. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure how that sort of thing is pulled off in a space station but whatever. Go with it. The show sets it up as a class control issue I seem to recall, but it could very well be one of limited resources. On the space station, what happens if oxygen becomes a truly limited resource? Are the powerful going to keep themselves in normal operation even if they have to starve the powerless to do it?
Have you ever lived at altitude for a few days? The mile high in Denver sucks badly enough. When you first get there, you are…weak. You aren’t dying or anything. You can live and do stuff. You just suck at it. You can’t walk briskly up a staircase like you could at sea level. You can’t even think all that well, frankly. And if you have a condition that further compromises your oxygen uptake? Yikes. Could be very painful and nauseating.
Or maybe you went to Denver on the plane and then drove straight up to the mountains and had to operate at two miles up. Say, at a Keystone meeting or a Winter Brain, right peeps? At this point, shit is getting real. And many otherwise healthy folks are feeling really, really bad.
They don’t die though. For the most part. Unless there are exacerbating health conditions. If you sent some people to Keystone Colorado to live for awhile, so that you and your buddies could have the same amount of oxygen you are used to at sea level, it’s not like you are pulling the lever on the trolley track switch to make it run over someone else. They aren’t going to die.
You are just, well, making it suck for them.
Getting back to the space station drama, we reach another nasty little consideration. What if, just suppose, what IF, the rich people were knowingly overpopulating the space station so they’d have plenty of workers competing for scraps. Then nobody would be comfortable enough to come after the rich, they spend all their time just surviving. And the middle class is kept in a precarious enough situation that they don’t want to rock the boat lest their subsistance, semi-comfortable amount of oxygen might be scaled back. I mean that happens right? It happened just last month and I’m sure it was all a mistake and the Governor of the whole place wasn’t really trying to rein in the feisty Professors…
Whoops.
Did I give away the game?
Damn.
Impact, in the Time of Corona
May 8, 2020
In an earlier post I touched on themes that are being kicked around the Science Twitters about how perhaps we should be easing up on the criteria for manuscript publication. It is probably most focused in the discussion of demanding additional experiments be conducted, something that is not possible for those who have shut down their laboratory operations for the Corona Virus Crisis.
I, of course, find all of this fascinating because I think in regular times, we need to be throttling back on such demands.
The reasons for such demands vary, of course. You can dress it up all you want with fine talk of “need to show the mechanism” and “need to present a complete story” and, most nebulously, “enhance the impact”. This is all nonsense. From the perspective of the peers who are doing the reviewing there are really only two perspectives.
- Competition
- Unregulated desire we all have to want to see more, more, more data if we find the topic of interest.
From the side of the journal itself, there is only one perspective and that is competitive advantage in the marketplace. The degree to which the editorial staff fall strictly on the side of the journal, strictly on the side of the peer scientists or some uncomfortable balance in between varies.
But as I’ve said before, I have had occasion to see academic editors in action and they all, at some point, get pressure to improve their impact factor. Often this is from the publisher. Sometimes, it is from the associated academic society which is grumpy about “their” journal slowly losing the cachet it used to have (real or imagined).
So, do standards having to do with the nitty-gritty of demands for more data that might be relevant to the Time of Corona slow/shut downs actually affect Impact? Is there a reason that a given journal should try to just hold on to business as usual? Or is there an argument that topicality is key, papers get cited for reasons not having to do with the extra conceits about “complete story” or “shows mechanism” and it would be better just to accept the papers if they seem to be of current interest in the field?
I’ve written at least one post in the past with the intent to:
encourage you to take a similar quantitative look at your own work if you should happen to be feeling down in the dumps after another insult directed at you by the system. This is not for external bragging, nobody gives a crap about the behind-the-curtain reality of JIF, h-index and the like. You aren’t going to convince anyone that your work is better just because it outpoints the JIF of a journal it didn’t get published in. …It’s not about that…This is about your internal dialogue and your Imposter Syndrome. If this helps, use it.
There is one thing I didn’t really explore in whingy section of that post, where I was arguing that the citations of several of my papers published elsewhere showed how stupid it was for the editors of the original venue to reject them. And it is relevant to the Time of Corona discussions.
I think a lot of my papers garner citations based on timing and topicality more than much else. For various reasons I tend to work in thinly populated sub-sub-areas where you would expect the relatively specific citations to arise. Another way to say this is that my papers are “not of general interest”, which is a subtext, or explicit reason, for many a rejection in the past. So the question is always: Will it take off?
That is, this thing that I’ve decided is of interest to me may be of interest to others in the near or distant future. If it’s in the distant future, you get to say you were ahead of the game. (This may not be all that comforting if disinterest in the now has prevented you from getting or sustaining your career. Remember that guy who was Nobel adjacent but had been driving a shuttle bus for years?) If it’s in the near future, you get to claim leadership or argue that the work you published showed others that they should get on this too. I still believe that the sort of short timeline that gets you within the JIF calculation window may be more a factor of happening to be slightly ahead of the others, rather than your papers stimulating them de novo, but you get to claim it anyway.
For any of these things does it matter that you showed mechanism or provided a complete story? Usually not. Usually it is the timing. You happened to publish first and the other authors coming along several months in your wake are forced to cite you. In the more distant, medium term then maybe do you start seeing citations of your paper from work that was truly motivated by it and depends on it. I’d say a 2+ year runway on that.
This citations, unfortunately, will come in just past the JIT window and don’t contribute to the journal’s desire to raise its impact.
I have a particular journal which I love to throw shade at because they reject my papers at a high rate and then those papers very frequently go on to beat their JIF. I.e., if they had accepted my work it would have been a net boost to their JIF….assuming the lower performing manuscripts that they did accept were rejected in favor of mine. But of course, the reason that their JIF continues to languish behind where the society and the publisher thinks it “should” be is that they are not good at predicting what will improve their JIF and what will not.
In short, their prediction of impact sucks.
Today’s musing were brought around by something slightly different which is that I happened to be reviewing a few papers that this journal did publish, in a topic domain reasonably close to mine, not particularly more “complete story” but, and I will full admit this, they do seem a little more “shows mechanism” sciency in a limited way in which my work could, I just find that particular approach to be pedantic and ultimately of lesser importance than broader strokes.
These papers are not outpointing mine. They are not being cited at rates that are significantly inflating the JIF of this journal. They are doing okay, I rush to admit. They are about the middle of the distribution for the journal and pacing some of my more middle ground offering in my whinge category. Nothing appears to be matching my handful of better ones though.
Why?
Well, one can speculate that we were on the earlier side of things. And the initial basic description (gasp) of certain facts was a higher demand item than would be a more quantitative (or otherwise sciencey-er) offering published much, much later.
One can also speculate that for imprecise reasons our work was of broader interest in the sense that we covered a few distinct sub-sub-sub field approaches (models, techniques, that sort of thing) instead of one, thereby broadening the reach of the single paper.
I think this is relevant to the Time of Corona and the slackening of demands for more data upon initial peer review. I just don’t think in the balance, it is a good idea for journals to hold the line. Far better to get topical stuff out there sooner rather than later. To try to ride the coming wave instead of playing catchup with “higher quality” work. Because for the level of journal I am talking about, they do not see the truly breathtakingly novel stuff. They just don’t. They see workmanlike good science. And if they don’t accept the paper, another journal will quite quickly.
And then the fish that got away will be racking up JIF points for that other journal.
This also applies to authors, btw. I mean sure, we are often subject to evaluation based on the journal identity and JIF rather than the actual citations to our papers. Why do you think I waste my time submitting work to this one? But there is another game at foot as well and that game does depend on individual paper citations. Which are benefited by getting that paper published and in front of people as quickly as possible. It’s not an easy calculation. But I think that in the Time of Corona you should probably shift your needle slightly in the “publish it now” direction.
DrugMonkey 