The Perils of Publish or Perish

This episode of The Random Sample is the final instalment in our special three-part series on navigating the world of academic and scientific publishing.

In it, we dive deep into the dilemma – and what many see as the pervasive mindset – known simply as publish or perish.

Our guest is QUT statistician Professor Adrian Barnett. As part of all the research he does, Adrian uses the power of statistics to reveal the pressures and pitfalls of the current system.

Plus, we explore questions like:

• Can things change?
• Should they?
• What can academics and journals do to make the system better?

Our host for this episode is Dr James Nichols, a mathematician and Lecturer at the Australian National University.

Subscribe and listen to the podcast for free on iTunes, in Spotify, or on your Android device.

Adrian’s column in Nature:  Why I’ve removed journal titles from the papers on my CV

Journal Preprint:  Researchers are willing to trade their results for journal prestige: results from a discrete choice experiment

Part one of this series explored how academic publishing works. Our guest was University of Melbourne mathematician Professor Peter Taylor. Peter is the editor-in-chief of two applied probability journals.

Part two of this series examined the challenges of publishing interdisciplinary research. Our guest was Professor Xiao-Li Meng, founding editor-in-chief of the Harvard Data Science Review.

If you haven’t caught either of those episodes, we hope you’ll take some time to do so.