Why Magazines Are Sticky | 4 Gravitons

An older professor in my field has a quirk: every time he organizes a conference, he publishes all the lectures in a conference report.

In some fields, this would be perfectly normal. In computer science, where progress comes in a flood, new developments are announced at conferences long before they have time to be carefully written up as a published paper. Conference proceedings are summaries of what was presented at the conference, published so that everyone can keep up to date with the new developments.

In my field, this is rarer. A few results at each conference will be truly new, never-before-published discoveries. Most, however, are talks about older results, results that are already available online. Rewriting them in a summary form as a conference report seems like a huge waste of time.

The cynical explanation is that this professor is doing this for the citations. Every conference paper that one of his students publishes is another publication on their resume, another work that they can demand people cite when someone uses their ideas or software, something that sets them above other people’s students without actually having to do any additional scientific work.

I don’t think this professor feels that way. He certainly cares about the careers of his students and will fight to have them cited as much as possible. But he asks everyone at the conference to publish proceedings, not just his students. I think he would argue that proceedings are useful, that they can summarize papers in new ways and make them more accessible. And if they give everyone involved a little more glory, if they let them add new items to their resumes and get nice books on their shelves, so much the better for everyone.

I bet he really believes something like that. And I’m pretty sure he’s wrong.

An occasional conference report helps, but only because it makes us more flexible. Sometimes it is important to inform others about a new result that has not yet been published, and we make conference reports less detailed than a fully published paper, so this can speed things up. Sometimes an old result can benefit from a new, clearer explanation, which normally could not be published without it being a new result (or lecture notes). It is good to have the option of a conference report.

But there is absolutely no reason to have one at every talk at a conference.

Between the cynical reason and the explicit reason, there is the banal one. This man insists that conference proceedings were more useful in the past, because they are useful in other fields and because he has been doing them himself for years. He insists that they are part of what it means to be a responsible scientist.

And people go along with it. Because they don’t want to mess with this guy, sure. But also because it’s a little extra work that can give a career boost, so what’s the harm?

I think this is why scientific journals still operate the way they do.

In the old days, magazines were the way physicists heard about new discoveries. They got each issue in the mail and read about new developments. The magazine had to pay professional copy editors and printers, so they needed money, and they got that money from investors by being part of profitable companies that sold stock.

Now, physicists in my field don’t read journals. We publish our new discoveries online on a nonprofit website and format them ourselves with software that uses the same programming skills we use in the rest of our professional lives. Then we discuss the papers in email threads and journal club meetings. If a paper is wrong or missing something important, we tell the author and they fix it.

Oh, and then we submit the articles to the same commercial journals and use the same review process as before. We list on our resumes the journals that ultimately accept the articles.

Why do we still do this?

Again, you can be cynical. You can accuse the journals of mafia-like behavior, you can trace things back to a desperate need to publish in highly regarded journals in order to get accepted. But I think the real answer is a lot more innocent and humane than that.

Imagine that you are a senior person in your field. You may remember the days before all these fancy web-based publishing options, when journals were the best way to keep up with new developments. But more importantly, you have worked with these journals. You have certainly reviewed papers for them, everyone in the field does that, but you may also have worked as an editor, tracking down reviewers and handling communication between authors and the journal. You have seen enough cases where the journal mattered, where tracking down the right reviewers caught a mistake or shot down a madman’s ambitions, where the editors cleaned something up or made a work seem more professional. You think journals have high standards, standards that you have helped to uphold: when you are choosing between candidates for a job, you notice that one has multiple papers in Physical Review Letters, and you remember papers that you rejected because they did not meet what you intuitively thought were the journal’s standards. For you, journals are an important part of being a responsible scientist.

Do any of those things keep diaries? worth italthough?

Well, it depends on the cost. It depends on the alternatives. It depends not only on what the magazines are collecting, but how often they are collecting it and how much would have been collected on its own. It depends on whether the high standards that you want to set for applicants are already being applied by the people who are writing their letters of recommendation and building their reputations.

And of course you are not in a position to evaluate all that. There are very few people who do not spend a lot of time thinking about scientific publishing.

And so there is not much reason for the non-senior people to push back. One hears a few lofty speeches about Elsevier’s profits and dreams about the end of the big profitable journals. But most people are not cut out to be crusaders or reformers, especially if they have signed up to be scientists. Most people are content not to irritate the most respected people in their field by telling them that something they have spent an enormous amount of time on is now pointless. Most people want to be seen by these people as helpful, not to slack off on work like reviewing that they feel should be done.

And most of us have no reason to think we know that much better. Again, we are scientists, not experts in scientific publishing.

I don’t think it’s good practice to accuse people of cognitive biases. Everyone thinks they have good reasons to believe what they believe, and the only way to convince them is to address those reasons.

But the way we use journals in physics today is really baffling. It’s hard to explain, it’s the kind of thing that people have been looking at with questions for years. And this kind of explanation is the only one I’ve found that matches what I’ve seen. Between the cynical explanations and the literal arguments, there’s the basic human desire to do what seems the responsible thing. That generally explains a lot.