送交者: Erxin 于 2006-3-20, 18:21:25:
So, let's talk about research.
It is not uncommon these days that people often find very productive professors in universities. Some professors managed to have dozens of publications a year, which seems to have push the human intelligence and energy to the extreme. To achieve this, one needs to take short cut, and the express vehicle is collabouration. For example, Professor Z published 30 papers in 2004, or 2.5 papers a month. Although one can never say never, it is unlikely that the 30 some papers were written by a single person, given the fact that the scientific world, unlike its pioneer days, is nowadays "developed", and in addition, Professor Z has teaching duties as well. What made this possible was that those papers were largely written by Professor Y, X, W, V, U, and many others collectively. In most cases Professor Z only did some minor editing, without any scientific contributions at all. Therefore instead of seeing N x M papers, where M <= 5, say, a year, by N people, we see N papers at the most.
Then, is there anything wrong with it? No, if by today's standard. But it's unfair when people are evaluated in such a system that only counts the number of papers. Junior researchers might have less chance to have many visiting scholars, thus increase the collabourations and productivity by a factor of K. Pure mathematicians find the number of theorems that can be proven is not linear as the amount of time elapsed. Computational scientists and engineers may find developing and debugging large codes is equivalent to committing suicide, hence kills the productivity by the number of publications that can be made. And so on so forth.
An alternative way of evaluating a scientist's productivity, and most importantly, the creativity, would be to count the number of publications solely by him/herself. This would largely reduce the count of publications -- those by a single author -- to 4 to 6 a year on the average, 3 would be normal.
For those publications truly based on teh collective work by multiple people, a mandatory requirement should be introduced in the first section of every publication, detailing who has done what, e.g. the first author introduced the idea, the second author derived mathematical model, the third author wrote the code and did numerical experiment, etc.