It is nearly impossible to determine which studies are bringing science forward now. But might it be possible to somehow operationalize this for studies written a generation ago, now that we understand their contribution much better? I guess quantifying remains hard, even if qualitatively it becomes easier going back in time. Might a ranking of papers work or comparing pairs of papers?
Then we could at least look whether in the past citations were correlated well with contribution to science. For my own publication list, I would say the correlation is weak, especially among the more cited papers.
Would it be an interesting study to have authors rank their own publication list and then compare that to citations? Authors may naturally be influenced in their ranking by the number of citations, which most will know to a certain degree.
I wonder how much funding has become more inequal during this period. At least in Germany there was quite a shift in how universities were funded with more funding for “excellence universities” rather than simply scientists with good ideas.
i only have limited knowledge of what happens in my specific uni but over half of all external grant money that researchers/profs bring in goes to university admin. one of the grants my project is part of was for around $2mil and the uni hoovered up about $1.2mil before it got to any of us researchers. and just applying for grants is a nightmare. that $2mil grant took 3 years of preparation and the final application document was essentially thesis-scale (plus we had to rewrite with more focus on ‘economic impact’ because impact on human health wasn’t a good enough reason for us to be conducting geohazards research).
a lot of the unis in my country have been axing academic staff & researchers the past couple years, even the more ‘prestigious’ ones, and they were already treating them terribly so a lot were pushed out by that too. i’m not sure how they’re expecting to get funding if they don’t have any researchers left, and i’m not sure why they think students would pay to attend unis that don’t have good teaching staff. it just seems like they want to be degree mills because it’s cheaper to do that than actually provide decent education or solid research output. they have plenty of $$ for admin & flashy advertising, yet our departments are on shoestring budgets. then they get all up in our grills that we’re not putting out enough papers!
sorry, i clearly have a bee in my bonnet about this, lol.
edit to get more on-topic: my supervisor has absolutely thrown my name onto papers that i was only tangentially involved with and shoehorned citations of my papers into places where they probably could have been left out, in order to help boost my chances of getting more eyeballs and a more serious look from funding bodies. it honestly feels so ridiculous being on one of those huge author teams when your contribution was like…teaching someone how to take samples (but not doing the actual sampling) or throwing together a quick scatterplot. i’ve had someone ask me about something in one of those papers and i’m like ‘lol idk’ because it’s so far out of my wheelhouse and my supervisor just wanted to give me another thing to put on my cv.
Funding is a mess. Systems designed by politicians who think or pretend there is a market with scientists competing. But without actual consumers buying stuff it is all so utterly fake. It is close to calling it competition that companies in the Soviet Union were lobbying the central planners.
The high overhead is naturally not nice for the scientists applying for project funding, makes it harder to get funded, but may be a feature, not a bug. In Germany we nowadays also get some overhead, in the past it was even zero (for the German Science Foundation). But there are still fixed costs, for the building, light, water, maintenance, secretarial support, bookkeeping and so on. So the base funding of the university was used for the overhead and the project funding determined nearly fully what research was done while only funding part of the university.
true, there’s always going to be some overhead stuff to consider. it’s just frustrating as it feels like every year they ask more from us and give us less. i want to do my research, and i want to help others with theirs, but i also need to be able to afford rent & groceries, lol.
the current systems of funding i think encourage some absolutely terrible behaviour and waste huge amounts of time/energy. everyone seems to hate this circus, yet it keeps on going!
