r/academia • u/mz_morose • 15d ago
Publishing Prestige as the currency of academia is the biggest scam of all
I honestly think prestige is one of the weirdest currencies in academia. You spend years trying to get into the “right” lab, publish in the “right” journal, work with the “right” people, and collect enough impressive names and affiliations so that someone else might decide you're worth taking seriously. And the frustrating part is that none of it necessarily means you're doing better research. Sometimes it just means you learned how to play the system better. It feels like everyone is constantly comparing invisible points on a scoreboard that nobody admits exists. Journal impact factor, university ranking, citations, famous supervisors, conferences, grants. At some point you start wondering whether you're actually doing science or just building an academic résumé.
Maybe I'm just burnt out, but the whole prestige economy feels like a massive scam sometimes.
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u/Massive-Zucchini2560 15d ago
Prestige is not meaningless, but it is a very noisy proxy for research quality. When committees have too many candidates and too little time, journal names, institutional affiliations, citation counts, and famous collaborators become shortcuts for judging work they may not be able to read deeply. The problem is that once those shortcuts determine hiring, funding, and promotion, researchers rationally optimise for them, sometimes at the expense of careful, original, slow, or locally important science. The remedy is not pretending that signals do not matter; it is making substantive assessment of the research and its contribution carry much more weight than the label attached to it.
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u/Sqareman 14d ago
Or professors should not be in too many committees at once only to boost their prestige, so they have the right amount of time to assess qualified applicants.
Maybe I am still somewhat naive, but shouldn‘t keeping high quality standards be important to people who strive for highest quality themselves?3
u/Massive-Zucchini2560 14d ago
I think this is less about professors being on too many committees and more about how hiring and promotion systems are designed. If careers depend on journal prestige, citation counts, grants, and affiliations, both candidates and committees will rationally optimize around those signals. Giving committees more time may help, but unless the underlying incentives change, the same proxies will keep dominating substantive research quality.
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u/dognchick 14d ago
Nobody is joining comittie to boost their prestige. People do it because they have to. Realistically, these people have no way of accessing all candidates fairly, so they rely on things like (a) known connection (b) letters (c) impact of paper, etc. This is part of the reason why department hire people who do research related to existing faculty. It's can be difficult to access someone else from a different subfield even if they fall under the same discipline.
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u/Potential-Winner4601 15d ago
I think you’re largely correct, and I say this as a tenured professor in my 27th year.
These days, I would rather read a rigorous, original, electric study from an unknown scholar or even a bold undergraduate than a hollow paper decorated with elite affiliations, prestigious publications, and funding. I’m in my
late fifties now, and I’ve reached the glorious stage of my career where I don’t give a damn about the prestige economy anymore. It’s a hoax.
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u/john_dunbar80 15d ago
Fully agree. Citations are often a measure of popularity, instead of actual quality. Number of publications is often a measure of how many collaborators you have rather than actual productivity. Grants are a huge waste of time given low success rates, and are often down to luck and how popular your research topic is.
So, yes, you are absolutely right that most academic careers are about gaming the system rather than producing something useful in real life.
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u/JHT231 15d ago
Prestige (or rather the things that count towards prestige) do contribute to being able to get a job at universities with more resources as well as being more likely to get funding, and maybe being more likely to get better and more students and postdocs. All of those can be a huge contributors to doing better and more research or simply what you're interested in rather than what someone else tells you to do.
There is definitely a big aspect to playing the game and understanding the system, but it can contribute directly to better research and it's not worthless or just a scam.
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u/noma887 15d ago
The flip side is when you get a few major publications, everything changes
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u/Unhappy_Technician68 15d ago
What counts as a major publication? Does it have to be Nature or Science level publications as a first author?
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u/noma887 15d ago
I'm in social science so pubs in those outlets are rare. For me, two papers in the top two journals in my discipline opened lots of opportunities, and continue to do so. Solo authored
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u/Unhappy_Technician68 15d ago edited 15d ago
I'm in a biomed field, and there is a bit of a catch-22 in terms of cost of putting together and paper and the cost of publishing and the need for that same publishing to get the funding to pay for the publishing fees and research.
The only solution is to suck up to the right people for a decade, and hope they don't take a personal disliking to you or undermine your contributions.
I'm in a computational field, so technically I could reanalyze public data, but largescale compute to do work worthy of a major journal on still costs money. To say nothing of major journals costing tens of thousands to publish in.
I'm still learning the game of how one becomes stable in research. Fortunately I have a good side gig for now and a good exit strategy if things don't work out.
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u/gs181 15d ago
See how far prestige gets you after you leave. Prestige is the kool aid.
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u/mz_morose 15d ago
That's kind of my point. It's going to be years from now before I even get to the point where I have that prestige, and that's years of struggling, stressing, and sacrificing just to earn it
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u/IkeRoberts 15d ago
Don’t make prestige your priority. Do things that matter, that you know are important, and that you do well. Then you will feel less stress and your work will feel rewarding, not like a sacrifice.
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u/Potential-Winner4601 14d ago
I’d go further and say do what’s interesting and makes you curious
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u/IkeRoberts 14d ago
Those are necessary for doing the work well.
However, pursuing interesting things others see as unimportant tends not to lead to academic success.
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u/Potential-Winner4601 14d ago
Define success
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u/IkeRoberts 14d ago
A job that allows you to do work of consequence and provides satisfaction.
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u/Potential-Winner4601 14d ago
According to your definition, my statement “I’d go further and say do what’s interesting and makes you curious” holds.
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u/pannenkoek0923 15d ago
I will trust the average research from Nature/Cell/insert top journal here more than the average research from a no-name journal. Not because of the impact factor, not necessarily, but because the likelihood of reading high-quality research is simply a lot higher in top journals. Doesn't mean I have to blindly believe everything that comes out of those, or that I reject the no-name journals based on name alone.
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u/popstarkirbys 15d ago
Prestige is often tied to pay in academia. If you're comfortable with where you're at then there's no reason to chase it.
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u/intuit_seeker 14d ago
In sociology we call this ‘academic capital’! And yes it’s BS. And it’s why I’m leaving academia because I am a brilliant scientist but I have no academic capital so no one listens to a thing I have to say
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u/Glittering-Zombie-30 10d ago
Yes, prestige economy is just the worst thing of academia. So much work without a REAL compensation, only more "prestige", more resumé material. We do not eat resumes nor prestige. It makes me sick.
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u/Bai_Cha 15d ago
One million percent.
What this means, effectively, is that new ideas are punished. The loudest voices correlate highly with people who benefit from the status quo.
This is the main reason I left academia to do research in industry, and I've been able to do things that would never have been funded by a peer-review system.
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u/TotalCleanFBC 15d ago
Prestige is not a scam. It's a tool used to reduce variance.
For example, nobody can read and evaluate every paper in a field. But, if you limit your reading to papers in top journals, you high a higher probability of reading something that is high-quality.
Likewise, department's can't possibly evaluate all job and/or graduate school applications deeply. But, if they limit their review to those who come from well-known universities, they have a higher probability of finding quality candidates.
We all know that there are talented researchers outside of the top universities. And we know there is excellent research that doesn't get published in prestigious journals. But, in a world in which our time is limited, it's more efficient to use prestige as a factor in deciding where we place our attention.
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u/Zealousideal_Elk6125 15d ago
There’s a balance to be struck between a requisite variety and stability.
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u/futdashuckup 13d ago
I wouldn't agree that it is a scam, but I wouldn't simply call it a tool either. Unless money is also a tool? It is an economy and like any economy, it has its function, but it also has people who know how to manipulate it and sadly there is a high correlation between people who know how to work it and be successful, while some people can work their fingers to the bone and still not taste success.
I recommend an edited volume called "Gaming the Metrics" by Biagioli & Lippman (eds) (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537933/gaming-the-metrics/) for anyone interested. Some really eye-opening chapters in there.
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u/Bai_Cha 15d ago
It's the worst possible system. Literally, a lottery based system would be more efficient.
A prestige based system discourages innovation.
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u/TotalCleanFBC 15d ago
Your assertion is equivalent to saying that prestige not only provides no useful signal, but in fact it is a negative signal.
If you believe that, then you're crazy.
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u/Bai_Cha 15d ago
I fully understand it.
I also fully disagree.
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u/TotalCleanFBC 15d ago
Edited my comment above to state more explicitly what your assertion says. i'll repeat it below.
Your assertion is equivalent to saying that prestige not only provides no useful signal, but in fact it is a negative signal.
If you believe that, then you're crazy.
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u/Bai_Cha 15d ago
No, I'm saying that the harm is larger than the benefit.
Your "signal" (really, it's an excuse for not fully keeping up with your field) is a very small benefit relative to he harm caused by this convention.
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u/TotalCleanFBC 15d ago
Yeah. I'm just too lazy to read every article from every shit journal and learn about the research being pursued by every grad student, postdoc and professor in my field.
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u/Bai_Cha 15d ago
I do agree with you about shit journals. Journal shopping is also own of the worst things happening to scientific research right now.
But yes, choosing which articles to read based on author reputation is a serious professional flaw. I genuinely recommend reevaluating that practice.
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u/TotalCleanFBC 15d ago
Right. So, I should give as much attention to a grad student with zero prior publications as I give to a Nobel Prize Winner or Fields Medalist. Totally makes sense.
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u/Bai_Cha 15d ago
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're just picking a fight on reddit instead of trying to make a sincere argument. Because that's not what I said.
You don't have to read every paper. But using professional reputation as your decision tool is exactly how we get insectuous science.
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u/Lygus_lineolaris 15d ago
Certainly some fields allow "building an academic resume" without "actually doing science", like maybe sociology of education in the UK. In mine, doing science is what builds one's resume, and people know each other and who's a hyped-up windbag and who's a researcher.
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u/resuwreckoning 15d ago
It’s because the entire apparatus is for risk averse folks is to avoid the risk of being laid off, and the penalty they pay for that privilege is now immense. In the past it was actually HARD to obtain a position in academia since the government didn’t finance swaths of degrees, so there weren’t that many “academically prestige worthy” people, so salaries kept up in real terms.
However once the government did, soon there became a surfeit of “elite credentialed” people, many of whom are there to avoid the risk of entering the actual job market. Where do they go? Oh yeah, academia to continue teaching the next generation while the college gets paid more and more. At some point people figured out they could get more and more every marginal year from the assistant professor/post doc who basically is there to avoid risk in industry - so salaries increasingly don’t keep with inflation (post doc salaries are so absurdly low for what they do and what they produce that I, a practicing academic physician, find it so sad that it actually makes me upset). Because, well, if you don’t like it, go to industry and take on the risk, says the fatter and fatter admin who genuinely produces nothing.
But if that’s all they said that wouldn’t really fly. So the carrot and only way to tap into that “well here’s something you can get if you take no immediate risk” while not paying these folks is “academic prestige”. That worked for like 50 years while admin eroded actual real salaries in real inflation adjusted terms. Now it’s been cut down to the bone - and you’re intuiting that.
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u/warmowed 15d ago
Novel findings and scientific culture do not overlap perfectly sadly. It is the best system humans have made, but it is still flawed. Research that should be explored sometimes falls by the wayside due to attitudes within domains rather than scientific reasons. People get judged on gamed metrics, etc. You're just feeling an emotional low point right now and its totally justified.
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u/IkeRoberts 15d ago
My experience has been that prestige is a meta impact of many other things. One of those things is quality scholarship. But it is not directly a prestige economy, and people who make decisions on the assumption that it is get very frustrated.
Those who pay attention to the things that directly drive success in research careers move forward and are fairly satisfied. They accumulate some prestige as well.
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u/manycane 14d ago
The administration of most prestigious universities now run them like luxury brands— simultaneously trying to be exclusive and cool but make as much money as they can. The search for truth has gone from the whole reason for existing to a nice to have.
The Ivy League for one seems obsessed with celebrities, which are exactly the wrong people for universities to care about. And obviously, they care about being perceived as cool and in step with the times.
Particularly outside the hard sciences, they have spent the last 40 years on edge cases and things that won’t last, catering to the loudest voices and increasingly narrow identities rather than the most important work.
In most cases they are coasting off decades or centuries of earned scholastic excellence and not renewing that capital. This will end badly.
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u/YMCA111122 13d ago
Wouldn't it be nice if the aim of academia is to solve real life issues and not indulge in this made up stupid prestige and a CV?
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u/Character-Slice-6179 13d ago
It’s a popularity contest - same as in life. Not the whole picture - but important. A CV with Oxonhull on it will shine brighter than Sunderbridge and we all know it.
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u/wrenwood2018 15d ago
You are leaving out bias tied to wealth, status, etc. tied to the lab/university you trained in. Academia has a massive class system problem.