Radu Craiu writes:

Halfway through writing this sentence, I lost focus. I cannot remember if it was because my email pinged, a phone message arrived, or a student knocked at my door asking for directions, literally or figuratively. I used to think that the rewards for my job were the respect of my peers, talking to smart people and occasionally having a good idea. The world is increasingly trying to convince me that I should reconsider: the biggest reward is the ability to draw attention. The well-known “15 minutes of fame” that animated our predecessors is long gone, replaced with a longing for 30 seconds of fragmented attentiveness. Those minutes were usually the coronation of a lifetime of work and perhaps some luck, while the seconds courted now seem to be more about the noise one can make. And the cumulative noise is deafening. Between posts about new papers or books that appear daily on most social platforms, arXiv feeds that have increased in size at an astonishing rate, announcements for the many online webinars and conferences, frequent requests for reviews of grants, papers, and hairdos, I am not doing great with keeping up with the Joneses. This feeling of inadequacy is persistent. How can I be a professional when I am behind on my reading of a gazillion papers? If my reading is so inadequate, then turning the question on its head, I sometimes wonder how many of our colleagues have time to read what we write? In this context, who can blame the elusive and progressively discombobulated reviewer of our papers or the under-motivated student in our nightmares? They are all also targeted by a myriad of attention-grabber apps, movies, news, podcasts, social media posts, as demonstrated by our increasingly rapid blinking.

Paradoxically, this “enhanced” communication environment can lead to insularity rather than community building. For one, the abundance of exposure to unvetted work, which has been greatly facilitated by online (mostly non-professional) dissemination networks, makes it statistically more likely to encounter papers that disappoint. While we have not reached the “almost sure” levels, we are close enough to leave us with a sense of despondency. In the face of overwhelming “noise” it is harder to identify the signals, which seem to be as sparse now as always. I have often heard it said that while PhD theses are getting longer and their authors publish more than ever before graduation, our discipline is not bursting with important ideas. Overwhelmed by an avalanche of “happenings,” we all tend to retreat in our own scientific bubbles, working on problems that are dear to us and leaving behind the hope of being read, or even misread.

It is then not surprising that many hiring committees still hold in high regard publications in traditionally strong journals and talks given at important conferences or institutions. While the last twenty years have seen an explosion in dissemination, the reliable avenues for vetting what is being disseminated have remained largely the same, or perhaps even a little worse for wear. Conferences originally designed for 700 participants use the same system, albeit rescaled in a hurry, to accommodate over 20,000 submissions. Journals that used to get 400 submissions a year now see tenfold, while the number of pages and AEs is only slightly larger, if not the same. They are like cities who started small, benefited from a wave of massive success that saw their population quadruple in a very short period of time, only to realize that their infrastructure cannot handle all the attention.

This explosion of demand and implosion of resources can be extended to the classroom, where the size of a class makes it increasingly difficult to assess students’ work based on data-driven projects that involve analysis and interpretation. Our letters of recommendation become more generic (how do you distinguish Student X in a class of 300 where 40 showed strong skills?) and the difficulty of separating wheat from chaff continues…

It is frustrating to merely rant without thinking that something concrete can be proposed to alleviate these headaches. We could diversify where we publish, using some of the new journals that have recognizable editorial board members. Some will scream “gatekeepers” and perhaps justifiably so. We have seen several initiatives where papers are posted publicly and reviewed openly by peers. That is an excellent idea, as long as people participate and the number of papers one can look at are manageable, which is hard to achieve when the system is completely open. And therein lies the proverbial fly in the ointment. As a community, we have to take seriously the responsibility of vetting, to the best of our abilities, what is disseminated under respectable banners, and we must fight hard for those to remain respectable.

I am sure that our community will be happy to hear realistic suggestions that can help democratize these processes so please write with your ideas, get engaged or both.

Perhaps this period is best understood as a transitional one? Maybe the challenge of our generation (if you’re wondering which generation: if you read this, it’s yours) is to adapt our ecosystem so that we enhance and scale up the elements that work and eliminate those that do not, so that 10 years from now, an IMS Bulletin column will be written about entirely new trials and tribulations far from the ones we are facing now.