Quantum Forest

Several years ago, I think it was 1996, I was given a copy of A Ph.D. is not enough: a guide to survival in science (link to Amazon), which is an easy to read and entertaining book. Not that the information contained in it is groundbreaking (it should be of most use to some extreme nerds), but there are a few things that I still remember. For example, a fundamental principle, in preparing a talk, is never overestimate your audience and the concept of publon, the minimum publishable unit.

Publication is a funny game, because in most academic institutions is one of the basic components of the survival system (by the way, this is not my case). Because of this, the publon (quantum of publication) is dominant in scientific literature. A set of publons, a series of short papers, looks much better in your curriculum than the odd juicy paper. Unfortunately, that puts a lot of stress in the publication system, with thousands of journals trying to cope with the influx of tens of thousands of papers each year.

Journals take quite a long time to review the manuscripts, and we end up with not so interesting papers that take a long time to be published. Biometrics has an interesting document entitled Review times in statistical journals: Tilting at windmills? (PDF file) by Raymond J. Carroll, discussing strategies for Associate Editors and Referees with the aim to reduce publication time. In summary, editors should reject some papers without any additional review, while reviewers should focus in content rather than in correcting spelling or suggesting useless changes to the manuscript. Using this approach in forestry journals would make my life easier: I wouldn’t waste time reading manuscripts that will never be published and publication would be much more expeditious.

In summary, pushing for fewer and juicier papers, and streamlining the publication process would certainly benefit researchers.