Why would someone write three papers on the same data set over a period of 10 years? Presented as 3 RCTs. The 3rd paper pretty much identical to the 1st but in a different journal and with the question switched round.

You know the answer, you wag… 😉

What stretching your data to three papers with only minor revisions and different data. I can’t believe it!*

*standard academic practice if you can get anyway with it.

To get into print.

Obviously the person you are referring to hasn’t done anything new for awhile, but wants to maintain his/her publishing profile. Lazy so-and-so.

I find it really aggravating, as these sorts take up space in journals that could be used to present new research.

See that’s what I thought too. But http://home.hio.no/~birg/english/publications.htm

Maybe they are just building their career on the one data set.

To get into print.

Obviously the person you are referring to hasn’t done anything new for awhile, but wants to maintain his/her publishing profile. Lazy so-and-so.

I find it really aggravating, as these sorts take up space in journals that could be used to present new research.

The defence is that the previous RAE assessment criteria required ‘output’ – almost to the point of not caring what it was/how many repeat papers you coudl get (my PhD supervisor got at least 5 out of one subset of my data) – as a judge of research quality and therefore future funding, so it’s just playing the game. As I understand it, the last (and future) RAE’s focused more on quality/uniqueness but was a ball-ache to administer and the gradings were not entirely subjective (quality being determined by a panel in each subject area, all with their oven axes to grind!)…

The rule of unintended consequences – pick a metric to measure a system by and the system distorts itself to become driven only by that metric at the expense of everything else….

Publications are the academic equivalent of undergraduate exams: a metric of limited use which is there to be gamed mercilessly. Why bother trying to write few papers based on a lot of research when you can write many papers based on a little research.

I think I’m guilty of this to some degree and I’m pretty sure almost everybody else is.

The other approach is to get a shed load of PhD students and flog them to death with minimal supervision, thus gaining maximum publications for minimal effort (5 students at 1 hour per week each resulting in 15 publications per year in total or so).

You often see the same with articles rehashed as book chapters in edited volumes. It’s almost as annoying as the impact the RAE/REF has had in my field (human geography), where abstract conceptual or position/state of the discipline papers are viewed as significant. There are journal issues full of papers with no empirically based papers. Papers with the longest half life, however, usually have a solid ground I empirical evidence.

The other approach is to get a shed load of PhD students and flog them to death with minimal supervision, thus gaining maximum publications for minimal effort (5 students at 1 hour per week each resulting in 15 publications per year in total or so).

This is what I need to do. I seem to have far too many first author papers, which sort of explains why I spend far too long at work. I need to get someone else to write them for me!

The other approach is to get a shed load of PhD students and flog them to death with minimal supervision, thus gaining maximum publications for minimal effort (5 students at 1 hour per week each resulting in 15 publications per year in total or so).

3 papers per year from PhD students?! no chance IME. Lucky if you get 2 conference papers (which don’t count).