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Sunday, February 5, 2012

Publish or perish is foolish

Last night I was shooting the breeze with a friend in academia, and we came to the old "publish or perish" rule. "Publish or perish" says that untenured professors have to have a minimum number of their papers accepted and published by reputable journals, or risk not being considered for tenure.

It struck me that this rule is as useless a criterion by which to judge a professor's worthiness for long-term employment as the long-discredited "lines of code per day" metric for programmers. Both guidelines fail dismally in the quality department.

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