>There will be a minor flood of papers pre-registering sketchy theories<p>Does pre-registering papers somehow cause all journals to lose all editorial control?<p>>Some authors will publish their negative results, but many will forget them and move on to more fertile grounds.<p>Why would they forget about something that they have already publicly accepted an obligation to publish, and how would that effect their careers?<p>>The bulk of these maybe-so works will be taken as positive evidence even if positive effects are never found or if negative effects are published.<p>First of all, right now the media (and other scientists, and regulators) jump on the single published vaguely positive result, unaware of the 99 negative results that were never published. It would be an improvement to reduce this list to only the media, who are intentionally being fooled for the sake of a good linkbait headline.<p>Lastly, there should be enough of a volume and normalization of pre-registrations that if you want to pretend like the statement of a question constitutes the answer, people will laugh at you.
This article points to a problem, but doesn't point to a solution.First of all, pre-approving papers isn't any significant improvement, since it really doesn't remove the incentive to "cook" results, and besides if the journals knew how to filter papers based on the proposition and the setup, it wouldn't be any different if those papers were also accompanied by results. Putting this in a different wording, the journals can ignore the results and focus on the proposition and method if they know how to evaluate them.<p>Also, judging a peer by his "quality" and not "quantity" of work is the only actual proposition, but it helps very little. If such objective criteria were known, journals would apply those criteria to the papers themselves, hence, filter only the quality ones and problem solved.<p>All in all, the conclusion is that problem is solved iff problem is solved.<p>What lacks, are objective criteria for a work of science. Anyone care to invent any?
If you really want lots of papers to your name, join a large particle physics collaboration. In the four years I've been doing my Ph.D. I've been a named author on over 100 papers.
(number of cites) / (number of pubs * number of coauthors) has been known for a long time to the best tenure/review committees.<p>Second tier doesn't use it, the politics should make it obvious why.<p>And the gov't grant machine doesn't use it, for different kinds of political reasons.
One of the positive effect of "publish or perish" is that every mathematician/scientist is obligated to put most of what he's thinking on paper and on a digital medium. It is much easier to search in a pdf file than in someone's mind.