Pure Pedantry

South Korea has become the latest country to offer scientists cash prizes for publications in top-level international journals (see page 792). Other nations, including China and Pakistan, already have such programmes in place. The thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars on offer can be a fat prize for researchers in countries with lean science budgets.

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Proponents can point to other potential advantages too. Scaling up bonuses for high-impact papers, as these programmes often do, might stem the urge to churn out quick papers in order to beef up a publication list. (Graduate students in China often need to have several publications for higher degrees.) And they also encourage scientists in countries with traditions of local-language publishing to think more internationally.

But there are some powerful arguments against the widespread adoption of the practice. Cash bonuses tied to specific publications are likely to exacerbate corrupting tendencies in the scientific community. Debates over who should be included on author lists, and who should be the first author and the corresponding author, will surely get even more vicious when a chunk of money is on the line. A scientist struggling to meet a mortgage payment might be more willing to forgo a potentially fantastic result for a quick cash-earner. And a researcher measuring science in terms of dollars might even be more tempted to plagiarize or fabricate data.

The question with any of these policies needs to be: Will this make research of lesser or greater quality? My gut instinct in this case says probably no.

Even if you scaled it to prefer papers that are high impact, impact of papers -- in the way that actually matters not just getting into a good journal -- is not usually determined in short time scales. Since impact can't be accurately determined this system would produce a culture of scientists who want to produce a flashy paper today rather than answering the question that matter even it takes them a while.

We need to arrange incentives for scientists to create a career of quality scientific research. Really chasing a problem takes decades, often with multiple papers that build on one another. In this sense, the existing system of reward by faculty position -- for all its flaws -- and monetary awards for lifetime service is much more likely to be effective.