Number

While I was thinking about the inadvertent consequence of asking our children to read a book each day, my friend JW showed me a study that he recently encountered.

In short, the authors compared the number of publication between some medical schools, with an attempt to conclude which one is better.

I was horrified. Some of our academic administrators have become followers Adolf Hitler: The problem of the quality of an army should only be considered after the problem of quantity has been solved.

JW obviously thought the same and remarked, "I am sure if one of the medical schools has two more journals, for example, Kowloon Journal of Medicine and SAR Medical Journal, they shall have an extra 200 to 300 publications lead."

For that reason, we focus on publishing more papers, and short term research is favored. We will not even try to answer a research question, because an unresolved question is a secure source of more papers.

PS. Do not fancy monitoring impact factor, number of citation, or the h-index would provide a better yardstick of our academic performance. I repeat, if it could be measured, it could be twisted.

See http://vwswong.blogspot.com/2011/09/citations.html