What is a good paper?

Higgs, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, mocked the phenomenon of paper quantity worship in the current academic circle. He laughed at himself and said that he can't find an academic position now for a simple reason: on the one hand, when the recruiter asked him to provide a list of recently published papers, he would truthfully answer-"This is really not"; On the other hand, the recruiter will evaluate that he does not have enough paper production capacity. Higgs doubts whether there will be another major breakthrough in the current academic culture of pursuing the number of papers. He said: "It's hard to imagine how I can keep calm enough to do what I did in 1964 in today's environment."

If the worship of the number of papers is fading, then the true meaning of the quality of papers is being seriously distorted. A popular concept is that the better the publication or the higher the impact factor, the better the research work. Professor randy schekman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, pointed out the harmfulness of this concept to science by targeting so-called top publications such as Nature and Science. Professor Xie even called on scientists to resist these "luxury" publications, on the grounds that scientific research is being damaged by improper incentives of "the most luxurious but not the best research gets the greatest return", and these "luxury" publications such as Nature and Science are the first to bear the brunt, and they are encouraging researchers to take shortcuts, pursue hot fields, and be keen on doing "eye-catching" work instead of doing the most important work. Schekman cited the examples of some academic institutions in China, and rewarded the authors who published papers in these "luxury" journals. He believes that this is a kind of "bribe", just as Wall Street needs to break the bonus culture, which encourages risky behaviors that are beneficial to individuals and harmful to the financial system, so science must break the atrocities of "luxury" publications.