They trouble me. Particularly in the basic biomedical sciences that have applications to clinical medicine, we are forcing practitioners to lead such multiple and hectic lives that we may be unwittingly creating an environment in which that stuff is too likely to happen. You just can t publish six or seven dozen papers a year from a modest-sized laboratory and be paying careful enough attention to what s going on. We ve got to get ourselves out of the pattern in which that kind of hyperplasin is routinely approved activity. It s just not consistent with.
Funding is tied to quantity.
I don t really think funding is so tied to quantity. In evolutionary biology, or in the most fundamental fields in, say, molecular genetics, physical chemistry, neurobiology most awarding agencies haven t been impressed by volume. Among the researchers who have fared best there are people who travel pretty light in terms of publication volume but pretty heavily in terms of impact. Where that tradition has not dominated is the fields that are tied to particular domains in clinical medicine. There, I think, there has been a tendency to reward volume.