Academia and Counting Stats

I’ve noticed a trend in the academic socialverse. When paper decisions go out for major conferences, I’ll inevitably see a tweet that resembles the following:

“Woohoo! {I / my lab / my FANTASTIC colleagues and I} have 3 papers accepted at {CHI / NeurIPS / SEC / etc.} this year! Paper 1: …., Paper 2: …., Paper 3: …” [emphasis mine, not even a real tweet]

Sometimes I’ll even see meta-analytic breakdowns: searchable tables that aggregate the number of papers by author, by institution, by country. I find this frustrating, and not just because I’m jealous. Maybe I’m a little bit jealous. But only a little bit, I promise.

I’m not calling anybody specific out. As with most social phenomena, these updates are simply reflective of the norms and values in our community. I’m not saying that promoting oneself is bad. In fact, I usually only ever tweet when I have some professional accomplishment (or bad blog post) to share.

But what GrindsMyGears is the broader implication of these updates: should it matter that one {lab / person / person and their FANTASTIC colleagues} had 3 papers accepted? Or 7? Shouldn’t we care more about the actual ideas those papers represent?

When we start by saying “I had N papers accepted”, the ideas in those papers become secondary to the accomplishment of getting N papers accepted. I feel like this is backwards.

Look, I get why we do it. We academics are still human, motivated by sharing our joys with friends and colleagues and getting the sweet dopamine hit of likes, shares and retweets. We shed blood, sweat and tears getting those papers accepted, why shouldn’t we celebrate that accomplishment? It’s not easy getting 12 papers accepted at a top-tier conference. When we accomplish something great, shouldn’t we take the opportunity to get recognized?

Sure.

But what if we tweeted about each paper that was accepted, its implications, and why we think it’s important, independently? We’d still get to share our joy with our colleagues, mentors and friends. We just wouldn’t be collapsing this real accomplishment into one simple count.

This isn’t limited to the number of paper acceptances per conference, by the way. It applies to any measure of impact and/or merit that can be counted. Citations. Awards. Students supervised. Grant money. The number-of-papers-accepted-at-this-conference-tweet is just something I see more frequently.

We latch on to these things, I think, because so little of our impact in academia is tangible. It can feel good to have something concrete to show for our efforts. But, as William Bruce Cameron (apparently not Einstein) famously wrote: “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

I might even go a step further. By emphasizing a count that shouldn’t count, we reinforce an unhealthy fitness function for our community. Do we really want our new Ph.D. students to optimize for “number of papers accepted”?

What say you?

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