Quotations to illustrate the content of the publication culture themes in postdoctoral fellows/staff members
| Theme | Quote |
|---|---|
| Research funding | If you have no decent publications to put on your CV, you basically have no chance on the grants-market, that is what they look at, that is your fundraising capacity |
| Authorships | Authorship is a political game, sometimes you list someone as a co-author because you have to and you don't want an argument over something as trivial as one publication If you confront him about it my boss becomes really angry and so I just list him You often need a hotshot to be published in a high-impact journal. He often has to be the last author |
| Quantity vs quality | A lot of what is published is nonsense |
| Publication pressure | The stress of having to have at least 4–6 interesting and solid high-impact papers published each year; failure to produce means you will be judged to some extent |
| Scientific integrity | One is easily inclined to leave things out just to get it published |
| Publication bias | That (publication bias) is the reason that fraud exists because without positive results I can forget about my career |
| Impact factor | That is what a professor said, that he preferred not to publish in lower-impact journals because it wouldn't look good on his CV |
| Competition, prestige, self-satisfaction and vanity | I think it is a universal quality of scientists that they are vain people, especially when they start publishing, they are often people who like the limelight and to be admired |