Publish-or-Perish Postscripts

Let me offer an alternative engineering perspective to Mohamed Gad-el-Hak’s well-crafted Opinion piece (Physics Today, March 2004, page 61 ). Some journal articles properly target applied physicists—a group of industrial scholars who are typically experimentalists. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and its member societies publish journals—for example, the Journal of Applied Physics, Review of Scientific Instruments, and the Journal of Rheology—that in part target that same important readership. The industrial physics audience rarely publishes; instead, it is composed of practitioners, who uncover clever ways of making money by applying physics. Their noble work secures and generates jobs and prosperity.

Some of us devote our research publications to such physicists. We craft papers to help them, to change the way they think, to affect how things are manufactured. Our search is narrower than the search for truth; we seek something more elusive: usefulness to the applied physics community. In my opinion, the real tragedy of the publish-or-perish phenomenon is not how rarely scholars cite one another. It is the precipitous decline in the proportion of papers of interest to applied physicists. Indeed, a journal’s impact factor may be inversely proportional to its impact on the applied physics community.

Thus, only with the greatest care should journal impact factors and individual citation rates be included in analyses of tenure and promotion. Specifically, for faculty members who bravely seek usefulness to readers from industry, journal impact factors and individual citation rates lack relevance.