We already know that some major publications are more likely to take papers with positive results, leading to bias from research institutions who try to give them those positive results. The utter abject corruption of science seems to go much deeper though.

Publish and perish at Imperial College London: the death of Stefan Grimm

Is Queen Mary University of London trying to commit scientific suicide?

I presume the D3 document must have been written by an HR person. It has all the incoherent use of buzzwords so typical of HR. And it says “sum” when it means “product” (oh dear, innumeracy is rife).

The criteria are utterly brainless. The use of impact factors for assessing people has been discredited at least since Seglen (1997) showed that the number of citations that a paper gets is not perceptibly correlated with the impact factor of the journal in which it’s published. The reason for this is the distribution of the number of citations for papers in a particular journal is enormously skewed. This means that high-impact journals get most of their citations from a few articles.

Is this the death knell for original and creative science in the west? I’m **** horrified!

Look at the number of patents filed by country’s around the world and its interesting.

Time to learn Mandarin?

You realise that patent means different things around the world, don’t you?

You realise that patent means different things around the world, don’t you?

Exactly; in China, you can register a patent by filling out a form and handing over the appropriate payment, then sue anyone importing something similar that allegedly infringes said patent.
And generally get away with it.
Which is why there are many blatant copies of well-known mobile phones, who’s makers have sued the original manufacturers for infringing the patents that were registered after the original went into production.
Extortion?
Noooooooo!

Likewise in the US. The patent office registers your claim to a patent, nothing else. However in the UK they check if it’s a sensible invention and no-one’s invented it before (patented or otherwise afaik). So you would expect far fewer patents.

Ya, the zombie maggot bureaucrats are pushing everyone to justify their own league table in order to increase their own, already, fat cheque.

That league table is going to be the downfall for the future generations …

😯

It’s a terrible story and what the bean counters are doing to universities is scary. The public don’t care, though, as they don’t fully understand how universities work.

Grimm isn’t the first, and definitely won’t be the last. This is what you get when competition is seen as the key driver for education and knowledge creation. Risks increase and thus management wants to check everything and get rid of anything which might not yield results they can fit into a spreadsheet.

What the bean counters don’t understand is that there isn’t enough money for every academic to bring in £200k every 2-3 years. However, there is plenty of capacity to sack managers obsessed with metrics and are detrimental of the core work of universities.

CaptJon – Member

“… managers obsessed with metrics …” <= They are called parasitic zombie maggots.

lol fair enough. Ours are particularly obsessed with forms, but none of the information we put on them makes it on to other forms asking the same questions.

CaptJon – Member

lol fair enough. Ours are particularly obsessed with forms, but none of the information we put on them makes it on to other forms asking the same questions

Wait until they have the power to set targets that will be the time you feel like someone squeezing your testes to make you squeal … not in pleasure but in painnnn … I got to know all this through some of my friends who surprisingly are academics. They are probably driven by the “marketing” people now and are constantly recruiting new young blood with “promising” energy (ya, new recruits always say they can fly high) only to see them drop left, right and centre every 3 to 5 years.

Their situation is like the younger me starting my first job and being slammed with a sales target of £200k per month … yes, I was set that target by some zombies. I then spent my time zombie-ing around like male dog chasing female dog in heat for sales for several months …

😯

This is very sad story but it’s not in any way a particularly new or unusual story. It’s been over 12yrs since I was in academic science (CRUK labs) and back then established team leaders were being pushed out for not getting grants. It’s the way things have worked in science for a long time. Also the unfortunate Prof here complained that his big grant wasn’t counted, which was probably due to it not including overheads in the grant. Grant money has been counted this way for years.

At least with scientific businesses you can largely look at the bottom line and see how the business is doing. In academic science there is so much politics and “latest bandwagon”. The public don’t realise but academic science is sometimes an absolutely brutal area.