2.12.2006

LPU'S
It's so hard to do research... to come up with a good paper which meets the exacting standards of academia; in light of this, I've decided to harness probability by releasing my hundreds of trained monkey minions to typing at computers and maybe they'll produce an economic paper.

Oh wait -- it's already been done with grad students, and it's even worse than you think: not one publication among us.

Speaking on the subject of publishing, here's an exerpt from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the LPU -- the Least Publishable Unit --

"In order to appear to have more publications on their CVs, young scholars are often advised to break their research down into pieces and publish those pieces in multiple articles -- i.e., LPU's.
As we talked, my young colleague described the larger picture of her investigations in molecular biology, and how she believed they would lead to a major publication within the year. But she also acknowledged that she was working on a couple of smaller papers that could be submitted to second-tier journals and that were likely to appear quickly and with little revision.
In other words, she has taken the advice of her faculty mentors and produced LPU's while also pursuing the brass ring of a major publication in a leading journal....

Having a couple of LPU's will ensure that the bean counters cannot assail her record. We both know that there are those among us who would easily ignore her aggressive pursuit of grants and a single brilliant paper in Cell if her four years here did not include the magic two papers. She's a realist and so am I, and our meeting ended on a positive note. I was confident that she was exactly where she needed to be to achieve tenure this time next year, and she was confident that she was doing the right thing by generating some LPU's."

...we're just a bunch of monkeys, churning out those LPU cycles

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