Incentives to Publish (Lots)

1. Incentives to Publish (Lots) John Lynch University of Colorado

2. What Has Changed About Marketing Academia over Last 15 Years? • Quantity over quality • Old school… • You get tenure based on your two or three best papers.. Sometimes 1 great paper • People read papers carefully and deeply so people recognized a special paper • More aspiration to write conceptual papers & more audience • Current generation of newly minted associates and fulls • “You have to play the game” • More common to prize writing lots of papers • Scan lots of papers • In tenure meetings, younger scholars argue for counting papers • As this group rises through the ranks, it is now possible to get a chair without ever writing a great paper

3. How This Affects Doctoral Training • The new leaders of the field train their doctoral students that what counts is to have A publications on the vita when they go on the job market -- any A publications • Easiest route to success in this approach • plug into advisor’s lab and get one’s name on several papers • Write more Psych Science short reports • Come in the door and start publishing • Students are told that this is the route to success so they choose to work with the faculty who have labs that publish many multi-authored papers…rather than “Joel Cohens” • Result… relatively narrow scholars who haven’t thought much about topics outside of advisor’s research stream and who are likely to do incremental work in those streams

4. Effects on Demand for Journal Pages • Journals have responded to this increasing manuscript flow by increasing the number of issues and pages • Part of the increased demand for journal pages comes from increasing internationalization of marketing scholarship and greater numbers producing serious work– clearly a good thing • But part of the increased demand came from the argument that “these young faculty need to have X publications in A journals to get tenure, so we should afford them the space.”

5. Ironic Effects on Hiring • This year at University of Colorado, we received a record number of applications for rookie jobs • 80% of the candidates had at least one “A” publication, some had two or three • Now more candidates who have more papers, so recruiting committees are less likely to read papers and more likely to count lines on a vita • Ironically, with more space to publish, having an “A” publication has become table stakes … better publish more short papers and start earlier!

6. Ironic Effects on the Field • Don’t even think of writing a conceptual paper before tenure • Veterans cluck their tongues and say (without irony) “I’d never have gotten tenure if standards are what they are now.” • Where will we find the next Joe Alba, Eric Johnson, Itamar Simonson with our current reward system? • Is the dearth of conceptual papers the result of a calculation that writing two good papers is better than writing one great one?