Knocking on Opportunity's Door, Part 2

I recently published a narrative about my research experiences in high school and college. In that article, I naievely demanded scientific experiences that would be successful as measured by metrics such as authorship and publications.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6310/382

As I look at laboratories around me, I see some PIs that care most deeply about the underlying theories of their work at the expense of publishing, some that care most about getting even preliminary work into print, and every spectrum in between. I am probably not the only one who feels conflicted about where the "right" place is to fall on that spectrum. In any publication, there are some theories that are more tenuously supported by the data and others that are more justified. How do we balance the need for concrete achievements like getting a paper published versus continuing to gather scientific evidence.

This recent analysis of scientific productivity (Sinatra et al. Science 2016) shows that publications are directly tied to chances for scientific impact, and that the impact is independent of where the investigator is in their career.

While these findings seem to support the 'publish or perish' mentality in academia, I wonder how the results would shake up if there were a direct comparison between clinical investigators and basic science investigators.

Clinical investigators as a category publish a large quantity of case studies or observational papers that serve a general purpose of sharing information and connecting with other clinicians over medical developments or observations in a rapid manner. However, it also contributes to a glut of papers in each field that may or may not actually advance the field. While clinicians learn to distinguish the types of articles that are reliable resources, and everyone knows where they need to publish to create an impact, how do the rest of the articles contribute to one's career? To the field?

Is it worth spending my time on case reports that I can churn out this year, or work on building a project of impact that won't be fruitful for another 5 years? I wish I could demand myself to focus on the goals that would benefit the field and my career the most. The harder part now, in contrast to my concrete demands in high school and college, is that I no longer know exactly what those goals should be. I and numerous others in my position can only guess. Let's ask Sinatra et al to publish a follow up study, shall we?