"Gaming the research game is not Science." Unknown

I am not the original author, but I posted this since it mirrors some experiences I have had in my PhD so far submitting papers. This kind of tweaking in paper and writing even happens when writing the first draft or sometimes even in the conception of the research idea or how to go about the implementation and experimentation.

There is a half-joke in our lab that the more times a paper is rejected, the bigger or more praised it will be once it's accepted. This simply alludes to the fact that many times reviewers can be bothered with seeing value in certain ideas or topics in a field unless it is "novel" or the paper is written in a way that is geared towards them, rather than being relegated to "just engineering effort" (this is my biased experience). However, tailoring and submitting certain ideas/papers to venues that value the specific work is the best way I have found to work around this (but even then it takes some time to really understand which conferences value which style of work, even if it appears they value it).

I do think there is some saving grace in the section the author writes about "The Science Thing Was Improved," implying that these changes in the paper make the paper better and easier to read. I do agree very much with this; many times, people have bad figures, poor tables or charts, bad captions, etc., that make things harder to understand or outright misleading. But I only agree with the author to a certain extent. Rather, I think that there should also be changes made on the other side, the side of the reviewer or venue, to provide high-quality reviews and assessments of papers. But I think this is a bit outside the scope of what the author talks about in their post.

I have a problem with this. In the old days, people did research for the sake of research, and mostly out of Europe came the greatest scientific works we have seen. I did my PhD in the US, and it is very unfortunate that "gaming" publications and focusing on "grants" is the meat of research. Before I get criticized, I was part of this process at a top 10 university and I am a proud American. It is because of this pride that I must show tough love. I chose to move away from academia without a postdoc because I hated it. I wanted to do research and contribute to work that pushes my field forward. Most (90% of those I met, and I dare say 99% of international students) only wanted a PhD for selfish reasons (entry to US market, salary bump, changing fields, access to RnD jobs, etc). Perhaps I am naive, but I wish more people did research for the sake of research. The only Clay prize went to a Russian who hated academia. Perhaps there is some truth in the fact the immortals in science are not those churning conference papers, but those laying seeds a la Laplace, Einstein, etc. I want to see more of those, because this is what will move the field forward. It is not manipulating metrics to improve a neural network for one use case, while knowing (and not sharing) it fails in every other instance. This is my second beef with research. When something is tried but does not work, it is not shared. Someone else will try and fail, and this build up will overall slow everyone down. I wish we were more accepting of failed trials, and of not knowing the answer (sharing results without the theory is OKAY. It is OKAY if someone else comes up with it using your results. Having spent many years in a PhD, I can confirm the vast majority unfortunately do not share my point of view. And I hope I do not come across as bitter, it frankly makes me sad.