The chapter will now look at grants and promotions, and detail the answers to the questions:
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• What is your understanding of the relationship between your publication output and
funding?
• Do you have an opinion about any changes to reporting requirements by your
university/the government?
The grant issue
Obtaining grants was repeatedly given in answer to the question: ‘Why do you publish?’ particularly amongst the chemists, and some of the computer scientists. Typical answers from chemists included, “What drives me to publish is requirements for getting grants” and, “of course if you don’t publish you perish in the granting system, so that’s rather critical”, and another comment: “[publication] is certainly a major consideration in the first part of a career. It is related to raising grants”. Other people also mentioned the importance of a high rate of publishing to obtain grants. One estimated: “You need a minimum of 30 papers in the last five years”, with another said, “I am guessing that most successful grant receivers average about six papers a year”. As another chemist said, “Everything stems from ARC grants – they expect you to publish in the best forum you can”. In addition, one computer scientist pointed out, “All promotion is tied to the publications you have”. Certainly the concept of ‘publish or perish’ is still very relevant. As one computer scientist expressed it: “There is still pressure to publish to get ahead”. Without publication, others said, you lose any chances of having a successful career: “if you don’t [publish] you die”. One sociologist argued that publication keeps people “geographically and socially mobile” which is important because: “… we live in perilous times in academic life and if your publication is not up to date you are in trouble … So if you want a chair in Sydney or Melbourne you have got to have it”.
Some people said these pressures mean people publish for a “track record to get grants”, and more than they would ordinarily choose to. One computer scientist said: “I would publish less if it was not the case or would wait to publish in a bigger paper … Promotion is tied to your track record. Grant success is tied to it”. A chemist said:
We tend to salami slice our publications because of the assessment problem. We are tending to publish thinner papers than we would if we published at our leisure … I would still publish, but in a way that would be more beneficial to the community, only one paper with everything.
A sense of frustration with the process of obtaining grants, and fulfilling the requirements of these grants was a common theme in the interviews. A sociologist stated: “Grants are about getting another totally useless publication out”. One of the chemists had a similar perspective: “I’m not a person for publishing everything. I think there is too much emphasis with grants needing publishing and without grants you can’t do the research”. Another sociologist was describing how challenging the grant process work was for their type of work: “My research is textual – not interviews, but I will be interviewing people because of the demands of [the ARC grant]. How can you fit a model alien to the actual needs of your research?”
The time required to apply for grants is causing some frustration in the Chemistry community interviewed because it takes precious time away from research. One argued that this was not a productive use of their time: “Increasingly I am stuck in front of the computer writing papers, grants, grants, grants … To pay bills, I spend three months a year to write grants to pay people to do the work”. Another chemist commented that publishing is a means to an end rather than a way to further knowledge:
… with grants you need publishing and without grants you can’t do the research. There is too much emphasis on how many papers and they don’t look at the quality or if things furthered the area of research. Publication output and funding have a direct correlation. Without publication there is no funding.
The researchers interviewed did not object to publishing their work, indeed most indicated that unless it was published, it effectively had not occurred, but they did say they are being forced to publish in ways that are not natural to the work they are doing, nor to the communication system they have established with their peers. For example one sociologist said: “I’m much more interested in writing books … I have to write articles too – it’s the way you get ahead. To me it’s a waste of time. The average article is read by very few people”. Another sociologist said they publish “to avoid perishing” and said there was a need to publish in international journals because their books were all Australian: “in order to demonstrate you are internationally known an academic needs to publish in international publications. I am doing it for my academic career, I don’t find much international pay off”. They described this as a “cultural cringe”.
As discussed in the Publishing section of the previous Chapter, there is an added time management challenge for computer scientists because the conference season overseas is at a set time which means that researchers who wish to prepare papers for submission to the conferences are in a period of writing up papers and reviewing papers in the
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beginning of the Australian first semester. The deadline for ARC grant applications also falls at the same time.
Promotions committees
In Australia researchers seeking promotion must apply to an institutional promotions committee with evidence of their academic output. This was another very common reason people interviewed gave for their work, with a computer scientist stating, “I publish for career”, and a sociologist saying, “there is pressure if you don’t publish … you are expected to publish”. Several computer scientists commented on the topic of publishing. One said it “is important career wise when promotion committees look at you”. Another said publishing “is required … It is mainly to retain my job, we are mainly promoted based on communication”, and another said: “I try to publish because it is important to have as many papers as possible for your career”. Publishing alone is not enough, there are still loops to go through for the reporting of these publications, as one Chemist explained: “The reporting requirement is tedious – every paper you go through loops to prove you published it, with a letter from the editor to say it is refereed. It’s unnecessary, if it’s in the journal, that shows it’s refereed”.
This pressure to publish can be problematical, explained some of the sociologists and early career researchers in Computer Science, particularly women, because the demands of their teaching load means research is not being undertaken at all. This has implications for their future career promotion advancements because publication output is a prevalent method of assessment as one computer scientist explained: “All the evaluation of research, peers and employer is looking at publications. It is the measure used to judge research work”. A chemist expressed the lack of faith in the promotions system: “I don’t believe impact factor is a reflection of the quality of the journal … Many low impact journals have high quality science. [But] because of the way performance is assessed we have to play games”.
Another difficulty with the promotions system in Australia is the promotions committees which consist of a mixture of disciplines, usually, “a panel with no more than one scientist in your area”, explained a chemist. Some of the interviewees in all disciplines explained that the difficulty with having a promotion committee consisting of people who are outside of the discipline of the person being assessed is generally there is little understanding within academic communities of how other disciplines work. Even within a discipline such as Computer Science, there are disparities in expected behaviours. One interviewee who described their work as being in the “Mathematics end of Computer
Science” noted that: “In most Computer Science disciplines, publishing in conferences is the key way to get information out. In Maths you go to conferences as much but you don’t publish work in conferences, the priority is to send work first to journals”. Another computer scientist said: “Engineering School promotions committees have no idea about the quality of journals”. This Computer Science/Engineering divide was highlighted by another computer scientist:
The problem is the promotion committee may not be from my field … Typically there is one Computer Science person on the promotion committee. Then another from Engineering. The difficulty is when both compare – they have to take computer scientist’s word for it. They have to convince the other people.
The situation is more acute when a committee member is from a completely different field. This creates the potential that they will impose their own disciplinary experiences when judging other people’s work. For example, an interviewee who had worked in Philosophy had previously only “published in journals and had given talks at conferences”, but when s/he changed to working in artificial intelligence noted, “the publication patterns are very different”. A few chemists interviewed appeared not to understand that conferences in some disciplines are highly competitive. One Chemistry interviewee argued that the people doing the refereeing for a conference may be the people who organised it, and so they have a need to put in papers that may not be up to standard. While this may be the case in Chemistry, and was a situation described by a couple of sociologists in these interviews, it is not how Computer Science conferences are organised. Another example was an interviewee who had moved to Computer Science from Chemistry mid‐career, and had been confronted with these differences:
It’s different, in Chemistry it is heavily oriented towards formal publication … In Computer Science the majority of publications are conference proceedings. I came to that community somewhat sceptical of conference publications. Now I’m not quite so sceptical.
When a researcher’s work straddles two disciplines it can become very complicated, as one computer scientist who does work on biological systems explained:
In Biology we have the need to publish in journals, in more experimental workshops. Conferences have higher prestige but you have to publish in journals still. You must find the mixture which gives the response from the publishing community and opportunities to the right people.
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To give an example of this lack of understanding between disciplines, one Sociology interviewee mentioned that all of the staff members in the department had been asked by their Deputy Vice Chancellor (who has a Chemistry background) to identify the top four journals in their field, which the interviewee described as ‘a nonsense’ in the area of Sociology and that: “Internally within the department we are doing deals with each other. There will be no congruence, they probably won’t find any repeats”. Another sociologist expressed despair:
I am so frustrated with the situation at the moment. The bureaucrats don’t listen. The department people simply micromanage the requests [for publication]. It’s like Britain, they have to change [the Research Assessment Exercise] because everyone has worked around it. There is an inability to listen to their better scholars. How do I survive this?
Many people complained about promotions committees. One problem the interviewees had was the emphasis on the number of publications over any quality assessment. One sociologist said: “Promotions committees shouldn’t weigh publications, they should look for articles that are genuinely new”. This comment about ‘weighing’ referred to the idea of putting a person’s publications on a scale and awarding promotions to the person whose pile was the heaviest. A chemist conferred, saying there was “no appreciation of content, they just look at the numbers. I am cynical, with a 20% success rate they must cull applications somehow”. The promotions system means that “altogether too much is published” said another sociologist who described a situation where “every field is swamped – a lot [of publication] is useless except for furthering careers … It will have to get a whole lot worse before the system collapses because it will”.
It is not just internal promotions committees who push the researchers to publish more and more, it seems. One sociologist who was interviewed for a chair at a different institution was confronted with very high expectations:
notwithstanding the seven books and 40 articles and chapters and Christ knows how many seminars and conferences the first question was “why has your article production slowed down?” And I said, look I have just written three books and he said “yes we understand that but your international profile has got to be stronger, you have got to”… far out! How much work can you do?
The person interviewing came from a Psychology background, which to an outside observer, should be reasonably similar in terms of publications and community norms to Sociology. However, this is far from the truth, as my interviewee explained:
There is a great deal of professional boundary stamping around Psychology and Sociology … he would be a behaviourist and he would be a positivist so he would only think that things that were data driven and internationally published count.
While this situation may seem extreme, the impression that emerges from these interviews is that this counterproductive method of judging work is the cause of great frustration and disquiet in the academic community.
Promotions committees and Computer Science
Because of the way promotions are assessed in Computer Science, interviewees said they publish in journals as well as conference papers but more for archival purposes than to communicate findings. The difficulty is that within the community the standards are different explained one computer scientist: “It’s the way your work is perceived. If you are published at conferences it carries a lot more weight”. This is different from other disciplines, said another: “In the Chemistry field you are driven to publish in journals. You won’t get grants unless you have a raft of publications … There is a balance between getting published in the literature and publishing your work in higher quality conferences”. The administrators at the institutions where I conducted my interviews are requesting the researchers to increase their journal publication, which is causing disquiet in the Computer Science community. For example one said: “I get the impression the uni wants to push academics to publish in journals … The computer scientists use conferences”.
This creates a conflict between how the researchers wish to interact with their international community, and their need to fulfil their work obligations. One described the problem with conferences: “We typically don’t go for national conferences … for quality reasons, we want to be internationally known. We get criticised for not supporting national conferences”. This requirement to support national conferences was mentioned by another interviewee:
To retain international reputation you need to be seen to publish in top conferences. That is not necessarily what you want for promotion purposes. Non‐Go8 publications are purely national conferences. The game is to get as many as possible. I think it is common everywhere … It doesn’t affect where I publish. The international reputation is more important than the local reputation.
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This situation of having to publish in places against community norms was in response to direct statements by promotion committee members. One interviewee explained: “My promotion committee feedback is you should try more journal publication”. This person was another cross‐disciplinary researcher:
[They said] try to have more of a mix with journal papers – broader range of papers. Last year I published mainly in conferences that were local. In the last three years I have published mainly in Australian conferences – they commented I should try top international conferences as well as journals to get more of a mix … They want me to put more in core computer science journals. I’m not sure how highly regarded BioMed Science journals are. They are not computer science journals so it’s not as highly regarded.
One computer scientist mentioned there are differences between publishers in terms of the time it takes to have a paper published, but: “it’s a political play. If you are playing career oriented as possible, you must go to the most regarded publication, which means out of date publications”. Some researchers play the ‘game’ at different times in their career:
There has been a shift in my attitude. I am now at the stage where the next promotion is to professor. I am more discerning about where I publish because of the promotion process. I need to do groundwork to convince a broad committee.
A couple of interviewees described tentative indications that the promotions committees and the ARC were finally beginning to understand this conflict in Computer Science: “During my renewal last year for the ARC, they asked if conference papers were more important than journals. They have worked out the difference”. An attempt to address this situation has been an Australian ranking of conferences (CORE Rankings Subcommittee, 2007), and it would seem that this will help the situation. As one interviewee said:
In Computer Science … there is less of a distinction between conferences and the journals. There is a distinction between refereed conferences and non‐ refereed … There have only just been recent efforts to rank [conferences]. That will have an impact.
Inevitably, there was some disquiet about the ranking decisions. One person who is in software engineering commented:
We have just been hit with league table of conferences and journals. If you look at tier 1 – software engineering is in tier 2 and 3. This will distort the work I am going to do – Tier 1 is all artificial intelligence stuff.
Summary of reward process responses
The researchers interviewed are generally very busy, with most indicating they worked greater than a full time load. Almost without exception the bulk of their research and publication occurs out of teaching periods. A considerable drain on academic time is the