I want to start an honest conversation about something I have been thinking about for a while.
As a fourth-year PhD student, I have watched the academic publication ecosystem up close. The pressure to publish in high-impact journals has created perverse incentives:
- Researchers cherry-pick results to show positive findings
- Null results are systematically rejected
- The same idea gets cut into multiple 'minimum publishable units' to inflate output
- Citation rings inflate impact scores
What do you think? Is this a structural problem that needs policy-level intervention, or are there practical things individual researchers can do?
I am particularly interested in hearing from senior faculty who have seen this evolve over their careers.