I’ve been silent for a few days, because the latest volume of the journal I edit is about to go to press, and this means I must spend hours imposing consistency and accuracy upon unbelievably tedious minutiae in footnotes that nobody will ever read or care about. There are assistants who should in theory do this work for me, but I have learned that their involvement is to be minimised, as they’re just as likely to introduce more problems as they are to solve them, and even when they don’t mess up, they never return pristine edited files. Instead, after weeks, they proudly forward heavily annotated PDFs, which I must then painstakingly correct regardless. In short, academic publishing is a plague on the land, and as long as I’m grumpy about it, I might as well make it into a post.
Last summer, we reviewed research showing that, as scientific fields grow, they become more conformist, and advances in knowledge occur more lethargically. This is a problem, both because academia is now bloated with more researchers than ever before, and their ranks are constantly growing; and also because anything seen as new, exciting or promising, is immediately flooded with money and countless new researchers, whose presence will only slow progress and ensure greater conformity. The pandemic era has been a perfect object lesson in how this happens.