The big grants, the big papers: are we missing something?

Dorothy Bishop hits the mark on all the negative consequences due to our short sighted research culture. I constantly notice how many papers from lowly specialist journals are cited as the basis for performing studies published in others of higher impact, or as justification of results. Like research metrics, we bought into the system and now the numbers are used as sticks to beat us by the corporate cabals who run our universities and government bureaucrats who can only read the bottom line of an Excel spreadsheet.

Too many people from BIS to VCs to deans and heads of departments are convinced that they can just have the top of the pyramid of research, that it will somehow support and sustain itself. This same logic is employed at macro level and at department level, and it's equaly invalid in all cases.

Well articulated, Dorothy! Incentivising researchers for having high costs and low humility is the opposite of what we should be doing. I wonder if a step forward would be to go back to the days when there were no university overheads included in grants. As long as Universities both take a 40% cut and do the hiring, we'll see Professorships advertised as "must have big grant" and little else. The money going toward overheads could then be directed towards, say, a mixture of short-term citation impact, and longer-term recognition, like Nobel prizes etc.