[maweki]

> valuing where papers are published over what they contribute

And who is the arbiter of that? This is an imperfect but easy shorthand. Like valuing grades and degrees instead of what people actually took away from school.

In an ideal world we would see all this intangible worth in people's contributions. But we don't have time for that.

So the PhD committee decides on exactly that measure whether there are enough published articles for a cumulative dissertation and if that's enough. What's exactly the alternative? Calling in fresh reviews to weigh the contributions?

[zipy124]

Avoiding the problem altogether is just throwing up your hands and saying "this is too hard so I'm not going to even try".

We already know there is some way to do it because researchers do salami slicing where they take one paper and split it up into multiple papers to get more numbers, out of the same work. Therefore one might for example look at a paper and think, how many papers could one get out of this if they were to take part in salami slicing in order to get at-least some measure of this initially.