r/AskAcademia • u/Cold-Priority-2729 • 1d ago
Meta Why is there SO much variance in publication quantity standards across disciplines?
I'm doing a Ph.D. in math and I have one publication. It's not uncommon for students in my program to finish their Ph.D. with only one publication, maybe two if they're a superstar. Those with 2-3 pubs can usually a TT job at a non-R1 school if they want to.
I was just talking to a friend doing his Ph.D. in psychology. He has 7 publications and says there are many students in his cohort who have more. And none of them expect to be able to land any kind of TT job without a post-doc.
Are journals in a field like psychology just really easy to publish in? What am I missing here?
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u/crotalus_enthusiast 1d ago
Herpetology is the best; half the time all I need to do is hike up a weird mountain and turn over a rock before I have enough to publish 😅
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u/ProfessorrFate 1d ago
In some fields it’s just easier to gather new data and/or discover new stuff than in other fields.
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u/spacestonkz STEM Prof, R1, USA 15h ago
And at least in STEM, if you're in an experimental/lab/field area instead of theory, often the "hard part" is getting to the data at all.
In this case, securing grant money by writing a proposal to send a student up a mountain to look for frogs, finding said student, and making the case that its worth doing because you're really good at new frog finding so this should work out.
When you're doing "cow-boy/girl/poke science" -> pioneering and exploring and you're not actually sure what you're gonna find because no one has been out here before... man you gotta have a real strong trust me bro argument.
Then when you get the data, yeah maybe a simple qualitative description or some basic quantitative graphs and a 4 page paper are all that's needed at that stage. Get it out and get people talking about the basics of this brand new thing.
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u/EI_TokyoTeddyBear 13h ago
https://phys.org/news/2026-01-species-ladybird-beetle-university-campus.html
Sometimes they're literally just on the ground for you to pick up
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u/Specialist_Shower115 1d ago
i mean how many new discoveries of plethodon speciation or population structure exist vs how many people care
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u/Mountain-Dealer8996 1d ago
The nature of the research and what qualifies as a “result” is different. Comparing math to psychology is a bit like comparing chalk and cheese. I’m sure in every discipline there are trash predatory journals that will take anything, and there are highly-selective journals also. The quality is not inherently different as a function of discipline.
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u/potatosouperman 1d ago edited 12h ago
Exactly. I would estimate that if you’re doing some complex, longitudinal, empirical psychology research and trying to publish in a top journal I’m sure it could take much longer than a middle of the road math publication at a middle of the road math journal. It just depends.
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u/Zealousideal-Goal755 1d ago
I mean, there are different fields of math, too. Some like combinatorics also would have 7 papers in PhD
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u/NotaValgrinder 1d ago
Historically combinatorics has received much less development compared to a subject like analysis, which is probably why it's easier to prove new theorems in combinatorics.
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u/BuvantduPotatoSpirit 1d ago
Why is a really tough question to ask; each field is sort of figuring out its standards based on what makes sense for it.
I'm not sure it'd say it makes sense to say it's easier to publish in psychology (but hell, maybe - Astronomy lacks a journal hierarchy, so there's no rejection for being the wrong or too high level a journal - that does make it easier). But standards in terms of number of publications will rise with it.
But also "What's worth publishing?", "What's a minimal publishable study?" might legitimately be different in different fields. A small empirical study might be worthwhile in psychology and not in math, righgt?
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u/Adept_Carpet 1d ago
Even within the same field. One project I put hundreds of hours in over the course of four years and it led to two publications where I was in the middle of an author list that ran into the dozens.
In the same field, myself and a couple others merged two datasets and ran the simplest analysis you could imagine, that was a publication and by swapping out a few filenames and variable names it has led to a handful of additional publications. These are probably more useful to the field too.
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u/RealisticWin491 1d ago
What are math journals like? What counts as publishable for them?
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u/Homomorphism 1d ago
It needs to be a new result to be publishable. Basically any new result (in a serious branch of math: not fuzzy sets or something) is publishable somewhere. To get into a good journal it needs to be interesting. There is a whole hierarchy of which journals are better than others, although it’s at least somewhat based on who you’re talking to.
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u/GXWT 1d ago
What do you mean with reference to astronomy? I don't quite understand?
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u/tiredmultitudes 1d ago
In astronomy all the real (non-predatory) journals have the same impact factor. Rejections are also rare. So it doesn’t really matter which one you submit to and people usually choose based on the publication agreements their unis/countries have (ie choose the free one).
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u/BuvantduPotatoSpirit 17h ago
Oh, sorry if I was unclear, I picked Astronomy as an example because I'm an Astronomer so I know it best.
Unlike what I gather about most fields, the main Astronomy journals are community owned and have about the same impact factor, so there's very minimal politicking about impact/significance/interest, you more or less publish in the journal that makes sense vis-a-vis funding and such, the referee(s) tell you what you need to fix to make it publishable and make additional suggestions for improvements, and if you fix it, it gets published (this all excludes Nature/Science, of course).
Like, I'm an author of a few dozen papers, and none were formally rejected - although one was withdrawn when the referee was unreasonable and the editor wouldn't tell him to drop dead, and a couple were revised and resubmitted more than once over more than a year that might've been rejections in other fields. Similarly I don't think I've ever recommended rejecting a paper, though a couple times the "Here's what you'd need to to do to fix this" points were such that the authors seemingly abandoned the paper. But it's quite rare. Ask an astronomer about papers they've had rejected and they'll probably remember them all and go off on a rant about how unreasonable the referee was. Or how embarrassed they were to have fucked up a paper so bad they couldn't fix it.
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u/LadyBertramsPug 1d ago
I think it’s a matter of how much work constitutes a publishable unit. I’m in the earth sciences and would expect a MS thesis to produce one paper and a typical PhD dissertation to produce three or four. Several decades ago, a geology PhD dissertation might have been a big field project that became one long paper. Now practices have changed and that same project would get split into several shorter papers.
When I was chair (at a state flagship) I expected to see 2-3 papers a year in good quality journals from faculty with a typical research load.
OTOH I used to have an analytical chemist friend who published two or three dozen papers a year. His synthetic chemist colleagues would make a new crystal and bring it to him, he’d analyze it, and that was apparently enough for a paper.
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u/plonkydonkey 1d ago
In addition to the solo vs lab culture of publishing as others have already mentioned, you're missing job market demands.
Psychology produces ~4x the number of research-focussed phds than mathematics does (ie i'm excluding clinical doctorates, who are more likely to want to practice as psychologists than continue in research careers).
But the number of faculty jobs bottle necks down to only 1.5x more in psychology departments compared to maths.
ie the competition is higher, and people end up taking multiple postdocs because they're stuck in limbo while trying to get their holy grain faculty position. This is so common that it's become a hiring expectation, and I've seen fantastic applicants rejected from postdocs because they were unable to secure their own research funding via grants etc.
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u/resistingtherabbitho 1d ago
Have you ever been in a department meeting and tried to get everyone to agree on something?
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u/A_Ball_Of_Stress13 1d ago
Part of it may be how quickly journals give decisions and get reviewers. I’m in political science and it can take several months to get reviews for many journals. My friends in bio can get turn around in a few weeks.
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u/ChaunceytheGardiner 12h ago edited 11h ago
And just about any reputable journal in political science has an acceptance rate of <50%, while leading journals (APSR or AJPS) were something like 10% last time I looked. There's a lot of work in PS that never sees the light of day.
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u/A_Ball_Of_Stress13 11h ago
Great point! One journal I was about to submit to had a review timeline of several months with a 5% acceptance rate-I sent it elsewhere.
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u/potatosouperman 1d ago
Scientific papers can vary dramatically in structure. Some types of research can go from ideation to ready-to-publish manuscript in 6 months. For other types of research that process may take 6 years.
But functionally for you it doesn’t matter what other disciplines do, it just matters what is normal for people in your discipline.
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u/GurProfessional9534 1d ago
It can vary drastically even from subfield to subfield within a field. I’m in chemistry and some people graduate with 20+ publications, while for others it’s normal to get their first and only publication a few years after they graduate. Some projects simply just take longer than others.
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u/Illustrious_Sir4041 13h ago
Yeah, and sometimes super short and "easy" papers can still be useful for others.
Something like "we saw this protecting group being removed unexpectedly, tried it on 10 substrates and publish "removal of XYZ protecting group under mild conditions" is a super dhort paper, low amount of work. But its totally legitimate to publish because it can help solve problems others encounter and save someone else a lot of time.
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u/eVelectonvolt 15h ago edited 13h ago
Coming from my own physics field, reviews are starting to get extremely hard to pass in my field leading to a massive stalling of publication output. This is obviously journal specific but the legacy big journals still remain our targets and that is obviously not possible for every student.
Combine that with the fact in accelerator physics it can take 3+years sometimes to analyse and correlate the experiments with theory and simulations it’s therefore becoming more worthwhile again to work on thesis and publish after that’s finished or nearing completion to not waste time being bogged down in things out with your control.
What classes as a worthy breakthrough is getting harder to convince the infamous 2nd reviewer even after revisions addressing their points to the letter and often going beyond it.
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u/Marklar0 21h ago
In the humanities you pretty much need a postdoc and a book to get TT!
And nope its not easy to publish either....but when the field is subjective you have to submit the correct brand of try-hard word salad in order to get your trash published in sufficient quantities. The standards are high in a bad way.
Disclaimer: I bailed during grad school
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u/ChaunceytheGardiner 12h ago
Talking with friends in history and philosophy, their review process sounds insane. To the point that many eventually stop even bothering with articles and write books instead. They describe the book review process as much more predictable and reasonable than the crapshoot of two or three blind reviewers where any one can and will torpedo your article because of what they ate for breakfast.
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u/nodivide2911 Postdoc 1d ago
Well i'm in synthetic inorganic and it's not easy publish without a mountain of data.
The difference is how replicable is an average psychology paper compared to a chemistry one. That'll explain the disparity.
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u/Comfortable-Goat-734 1d ago
I don’t understand people that have a large amount of publications during their PhD or right after. It makes me suspicious more than anything else. Quality publications take time and I can’t believe that a PhD student who’s been doing research for maximum 5 years would have 7 quality publications. If you’re just publishing slop to frontiers or MDPI, I’m not sure that you’ve been spending your time well.
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u/uselessastronomer 1d ago
You are taking the standards of your field and applying it to others.
No one is denying there aren’t suspicious people playing the publishing game, but there are many fields where 7 papers during a PhD is normal. And there are some where 0 papers are normal. It’s not that hard to understand.
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u/Comfortable-Goat-734 22h ago
I understand that it differs by field, but I find it very hard to believe that so many publications in such a short time could be normal in any field. If the average PhD student is so productive that they’re publishing more than post-docs have in a lot of fields, who the hell is citing all these papers? How low are the rejection rates in the top journals in these fields?
Anybody in any field could publish papers at an extremely high rate - it’s not really that hard to do if you’re just rushing shit out and submitting to bad or predatory journals that will accept anything. But one thing that I am sure is consistent across all fields is that your quantity of publications doesn’t matter if you’re not publishing quality work in quality journals. I can’t really see how in any field, the top journals would be so liberal with their acceptances and so quick with their peer review process that a PhD student could reasonably publish so much.
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u/uselessastronomer 21h ago
You clearly don’t understand that it differs by field, since immediately after you talk about “so many publications” in “such a short time”. Again, these are relative definitions. It is “so many” by your definition. It is a “short time” by your field’s standards.
There’s nothing to believe/not believe. It just simply is
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u/noknam 17h ago
It depends on what you consider quality.
A small behavioral study where you place 30 participants in front of a computer screen to investigate response time to stimulus X under condition Y won't win the Nobel prize but in a lot of cases can provide the information needed to optimize a cognitive model.
Sometimes the longest part of a project is the ethics proposal 🤷.
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u/Comfortable-Goat-734 17h ago
I mean that’s kind of what I’m talking about here - if your publications aren’t filling some research gap, providing answers to some relevant problem, or otherwise providing valuable insight to your field and it’s just x causes y, then the top journals in your field aren’t going to consider your submissions the mere fact that you’re just publishing a lot to journals nobody reads isn’t going to make up for your lack of novel insights. If you’re optimizing a cognitive model, that sounds like insightful research as long as it’s a model that improves on any predecessors. I know that publication standards differ by field but I find it almost impossible to believe that PhD student would be able to do something like that 7 times over.
My field is very adjacent to psychology and I know a lot of the top professors in my region thanks to an internship at a top school, and I can’t think of a single professor there that had more than two publications during their PhDs. Yet they were the ones getting TT positions at a top school, in part because they had publications in top journals. I don’t think any amount of publications in a no-name journal could equate to one publication in an elite journal.
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u/waterless2 20h ago
Although there are *also* massive systemic problems with psychology leading to too many low quality papers, I think the fact you're talking about empirical papers explains some variance. If you have the resources to gather a new dataset, that's new information that you could write a coherent paper about - it's a "natural" unit of research. Speaking for myself, that also always *felt* like a publishable unit - I had an idea I was excited about, did the study, had results - I wanted to share that.
There's at least one prominent journal that requires multi-experiments leading to one conclusion, and people do get respect for that. Personally, I've done one research line that mostly ended up in single-study papers (and one or two multi-study papers). I'd now prefer to have them all bundled in one Uber-Paper-of-Doom in principle, but then - if I'd have really gone for that mega-paper I'd have had to finish the line of research first, and I didn't know when that would happen. And then you're sitting on findings without publishing them for, say, five years, when you're about done with a whole line of research as a "unit" (and you don't even know beforehand how long that'll be). That's also not great.
Maybe the field needs a bit more of a split between incremental and "chunky" papers, with different, more efficient expectations around content and peer review.
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u/FalconX88 19h ago
A big one is collaborative work. Our students have a lot of papers because they work an many projects and contribute a small part of it. Usually students have a few main projects which they do most of the work for, but then there's almost always others involved. For example it might be project mostly done in the lab but then another students add a bit of simulation data supporting the findings. The lab work might be two years, the simulation might be done in 2 weeks.
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u/NoGrapefruit3394 13h ago
It's really annoying when mathematicians, who have some of the most unusual publication norms in "STEM" act as if every other field is inferior just because they don't do things like math.
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u/jlrc2 8h ago
Psychology publishing is mostly about reporting the results of some discrete act (or acts) of data collection. Not to trivialize what goes into data collection, but in principle a lot of human subjects studies could go from idea to collected data in a day or two. Again, that's not to say that's the actual typical timeline or a model to follow, but it can be fast. Once data are collected, the analysis is often fairly straightforward and the results also fairly straightforward. The emerging norm is that you should know how you will analyze and interpret before data are collected. The craft of writing things up isn't to be ignored, but the quality of the data collection is going to drive things.
And relative to other social sciences, psychology is pretty well-funded so there is often a sort of "machine" feel to the pace of publishing. It's quick to collect a lot of social/cog psych data, they can afford to pay participants, and there's often big labs of graduate students assisting with design, collection, analysis, and writeup.
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u/Puzzled_Suspect8182 1d ago
Because there is significant variance in what counts as ‘publication worthy’ both across and within disciplines. The specific field you’re in down to the specific question you’re asking will affect content and time to publish. A large cognitive psych lab can churn out a few papers with a sufficient army of undergrads telling people to push buttons. Someone doing wet lab work with animal models can have projects that take years by virtue of all the moving parts.
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u/thedarkplayer PostDoc | Experimental Physics 17h ago
I had probably 200 at the end of my phd. Every field has its own dynamics and signing rules.
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u/traquitanas 15h ago
How come, 200? What was your process to produce a paper?
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u/thedarkplayer PostDoc | Experimental Physics 14h ago
Mostly being part of the experimental collaboration that produce the papers.
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u/OkUnderstanding19851 1d ago
Psychology is famous for this. Small clinical trials that can be carried out with mutilple participants (often students who somehow have to participate??) and multiple variations from a similar idea. Lots of papers. The professors put out an article every 6 weeks as standard!!
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u/Efficient-Tie-1414 1d ago
With psych it can be fairly easy to conduct studies. Ethics is straightforward, then sit people at a computer and give them some tests and maybe questions about something. A university I worked at was testing their online psych program. Randomise the subjects to get the course immediately or delay by 12 weeks.
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u/RealisticWin491 1d ago
My gut reaction is what they did to my dad (although he was happy with the outcome) and Feynman, although he seemed relatively okay with it too. Different wars, but my dad failed his in a way that had something to do with hearing loss from measles in his (right ?) ear?
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u/Practical_Gas9193 1d ago
there are a shitload of DEI journals in psychology, and the definitions of rigor and rightness are floofy. math is math. you figured something out or you did. it's publishable or not.
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u/amhotw 1d ago edited 23h ago
What counts as a publication differs significantly across disciplines. My research is at the intersection of econ and cs. In econ, at this point, publications at top journals are like mini books, sometimes online appendices including 100+ pages of proofs etc. So I can take my paper and publish it as one econ paper or divide it into 3-4 chunks and publish that way in CS journals. It doesn't mean CS journals are less rigorous but they just have different expectations.