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Daniel Lemire
I am not opposed to the Publish or Perish mantra. I am an academic writer. I am what I publish. We all think of researchers as people wearing laboratory coats, working on exotic devices. And my own laboratory includes a one-million-dollar computer cluster with a SAN server as large as a fridge. I also generate much software. But you know what? The writing is what matters.
And publishing is easy. Write and submit many papers conforming to the expectations of the editors. Eventually, some of your work will be accepted. And there are thousands of journals, conferences and workshops. Just write a lot.
Yet, don’t publish everything you write—even when what you wrote looks like a research paper. Hold on to it. Because, publishing everything that looks like a research paper leads to what Feynman famously described as Cargo Cult Science. Indeed, there is a real danger that we become so good at faking science that we are no longer doing science at all! We become dishonest.
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