>It's an illusion to expect that every researcher can pump out multiple really interesting non-boring papers every year. So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. It must look like there is steady hard noble work and toil. It's like a ritual. The scientists are writing all these papers so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work.
The flip-side to this is that there is a glut of moderately motivated scientists and PhD candidates. As a result, the demand for conferences and citations is self-sustaining to meet the expectations of millions of people wanting to enter the academic world without a clear plan beyond joining the world itself.
It's as though the English-major-to-professor cycle has also become a reality in the hard sciences.
The flip-side to this is that there is a glut of moderately motivated scientists and PhD candidates. As a result, the demand for conferences and citations is self-sustaining to meet the expectations of millions of people wanting to enter the academic world without a clear plan beyond joining the world itself.
It's as though the English-major-to-professor cycle has also become a reality in the hard sciences.