I write and submit about eight grant applications per year to get the funding in need to keep the lab running. Ten years ago I could get two grants per year or about 25% of my grant applications would be funded. Now however, I am lucky to get one grant every two years. So my success rate is now 1 out of 16 submissions being funded. That fall in my batting average is a reflection of the economy and state of research in the USA. What is bizarre however is that with fewer grants I am still expected to publish papers. Annually I publish about 6 papers a year and that number remains the same despite a 75% fall in grants received.

I am forced to increase the number of papers per study to maintain status quos. The way I do that is I now write and publish more papers using smaller data sets. Smaller data sets mean the papers are often incomplete pictures of the story being told. Now, it takes several papers to tell the story. I also write multiple review articles to increase my output. This is the infamous publish or perish doctrine of academia. Review articles generally do not have new data in them but summarize the data from 3 to 5 of my previous papers. I now write one review per 3 papers when previously it was more like one review per 5 research articles.

The overall impact on the state of grant funding has resulted in a decrease in the quality and content of the papers I am publishing. Because administrators only count the papers produced a backlash is at risk of occurring because they seem to be implying that if I can maintain 6 papers per grant I should therefore be able to double the papers if I double my grant funding. This is assuming that I survive the down turn and get back to having 1 in 4 grants funded. However, I’m hoping to return to the quality of the science reported should funding normalize again. Please understand the quality of the science is not changed, it is how thin the science is per paper published that has occurred by squeezing out more with less.

The real victim of this degradation of paper quality is that my students are beginning to think that writing and publishing small simple papers is an acceptable way to convey scientific information. They learn by example and the example I am setting is not the one I would normally want to convey to them. I’ve been in discussions with colleagues while students are present and we take a solid scientific series of data and break it up into little parts to publish two papers, when one substantial paper would contain a more complete message. This makes intuitive sense to students who have been educated in the E-generation where tweets and texts tell all that is needed in 140 character soundbites. So the micro paper publication is here to stay and with it goes a generation of scientists, like myself, who were taught to tell a complete story. Now we will be getting data soundbites and are losing the ability to synthesize data into a cohesive message.

The death of the scientific story teller is just sad.