The Damocles sword: publish or perish (run or be eaten)

Post date: Feb 02, 2015 6:4:43 PM

These days I'm working on a multitude of papers. I've got few paper accepted: The paper with Alioscia Hamma and Max Di Ventra in EPL, mine on entropy in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, and I have one submitted to PRD with Leonardo Banchi.

Few are upcoming but finished: one with James McNerney and Doyne Farmer, one on Multi-scaling properties of energy markets, with my colleagues at Invenia and Tomaso Aste at UCL. Another one is basically finished, on the fluctuations in Input-Output BEA Tables, still with McNerney and Farmer.

Main thing I'm working on right now: the analysis of correlation and planar maximally filtered graphs for Energy Markets and in general the structure of correlations.

Work in progress.. lots, although they take little time every week!

First: a directed percolation model with overlapping circles with Fabio Caccioli (a version based on percolation of a disordered system called Random Anisotropy Model).

Second: I am trying to calculate the amount of information stored in memristor networks using spin glasses techniques.

Third: a smaller project on cyclic cosmologies and primordial black holes is with Stefano Bianchi and Casey Tomlin.

Now.. all this work for? Not to say that I am doing crap. I actually think that some of these papers are nice. There are ideas and results. That said: I think I would do so much better if I had the time to focus on one thing and do that.

But afterall..publish or perish, right?

Another myth is the one interdisciplinarity. There is always a requirement for interdisciplinary approaches, which means somebody who knows a bit of this and a bit of that, so to speak, and is able to apply it to other fields. However, my career has been insofar extremely interdisciplinary. I did my PhD in Quantum Gravity, with focus on dynamical quantum networks, but I've worked also (a bit) on black holes, a bit on the renormalization group, and a bit on Group Field Theory. Afterall, the focus was on statistical physics and condensed matter approaches. Then I moved to complexity. I have focused on networks models in economics, engineering, and physics out of equilibrium. This is interdisciplinary work, I am focused in networks, and yet people say I am not focused enough.

What do you mean by interdisciplinarity, then?

All the researchers I have great esteem of, starting with Einstein, Fermi and Feynman, were interdisciplinary researchers.

All the great statistical physicists, were interdisciplinary researchers. Yet, in order to find a postdoc, you must be an expert. But of what? Of course, of what people offering you a job. The reason is clear: they want you to be effective on the task, focused and fast. It makes sense.

I am confused. Weren't wee free thinkers? Isn't this a sort of paradox? Not to be radical or extremist. The progress is the progress, and academic had great advantages for years. But how do you expect any young scientist, unless he is lucky and good enough to find the right topic at the beginning of his PhD, to make a difference, if then these are treated as they are?

We don't have job stability. We don't have continent stability. We are paid what we are (which is way lower than bankers, let's say it), we have a very small chance of making it to a permanent job, and if you decide to leave, you are a failure.

Give me a break.