{"id":14365,"date":"2025-02-05T11:36:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-05T16:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14365"},"modified":"2025-02-08T14:40:59","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T19:40:59","slug":"competition-and-survival-in-modern-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14365","title":{"rendered":"Competition and Survival in Modern Academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesper Grimstrup and Jarl Sidelmann have an interesting new paper up on the arXiv, entitled Competition and survival in modern academia: A bibliometric case study of theoretical high-energy physics<\/a>. It uses bibliometric data to study career paths in hep-th, especially how many people who start out in the field are still in it at various later times.<\/p>\n

If you think that things are going fine in hep-th, this kind of study is of limited interest. If you think the field is in trouble, it’s of interest as pointing to one source of the trouble. The problem with this kind of thing though is that on the whole the people making decisions about what to do are the “survivors”, for whom the current system has worked out just fine. They’re the least likely people to think there’s a crisis or to see any reason to do anything about it. As for the job situation (which has been terrible since 1970), I can report that when one doesn’t have a permanent job this seems to be an important and serious problem, but once one does have a permanent job all of a sudden it seems much less important.<\/p>\n

What has struck me most in recent decades about hep-th is not the bad job environment, but the monotone-decreasing number of interesting new ideas, now so small that I don’t think “intellectual collapse” is an unfair characterization of what’s happened. I started carefully following the latest preprints in the field more than 40 years ago, pre-arXiv, when they were collected physically at a “preprint library” in one’s institution. Most preprints in hep-th have always been minor advances, not of much interest unless you’re working on much the same problem, but in the past there were always a significant number with something really new and significant to report. The arrival in the preprint library of something new from Witten or any number of other well-known figures in the field was an event, and there also was a steady stream of new ideas coming from people not so well-known. In recent years the situation has been very different, with something worth reading appearing in the arXiv hep-th section less and less often, to the point where it’s a rare occurrence.<\/p>\n

This slow death of the field I believe is a very real phenomenon, although I’m not sure how one could quantify it. There are multiple reasons for why it has happened, some of which are just facts of life (the SM is too good, no unexpected experimental results). I do think though that one reason is the one the authors here are trying to get at: decades and decades of a difficult job situation where the only viable way to win the game of survivor is to publish lots of papers in a dwindling number of accepted research programs. This is one problem that the field actually could do something about, but chances of that happening seem remote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesper Grimstrup and Jarl Sidelmann have an interesting new paper up on the arXiv, entitled Competition and survival in modern academia: A bibliometric case study of theoretical high-energy physics. It uses bibliometric data to study career paths in hep-th, especially … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14365"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14368,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14365\/revisions\/14368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}