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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

One side effect I didn't see mentioned in the article:

One professor of mine spoke of the LPU, the least publishable unit. So, if you're lucky enough to have some novel ideas, and build something nice out of it, don't put it all into one coherent and easily digested journal paper! The number of publications counts.

Instead, chop it into little pieces that are just "novel" or noteworthy enough (LPUs), and publish them separately. Publication list inflation accomplished; and scientific progress/intelligibility/successful communication be damned.

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Honestly, I think this is often said cynically but is a good practice overall. Would you rather have to read and understand one giant commit reflecting 2 years of work, or 10 well-documented and logically complete individual commits?

The issue is that novel paper ideas will be split across multiple years (and even multiple conferences), making it much harder to actually see the whole picture for a reader. Each little piece of the paper will often also be bloated with unnecessary extra detail in order to reach the threshold for "minimum publishable paper".

Using the same code analogy as the parent, this is like code with unnecessary extra commenting. Seems okay to me.

Splitting up a groundbreaking idea into so many papers that the idea is lost is 1) going beyond a “minimal publishable unit” and 2) not in the authors’ interest, since getting credit for a groundbreaking idea in a correspondingly prestigious outlet is much better than getting credit for 2 or 3 bad ideas. I’m sure there’s a level of novelty where 2 irrelevant papers is better for the author than 1 single paper, but I don’t think we should design academic publishing around slightly-better-than-mediocre contributions.

The analogy doesn't hold up.

Commits have a more fixed size.

Formal logic cannot be reduced in character count too far, at least without making it unintelligible (fear the day Alex the intern wheels out Unicode emoji variables).

Spreading the commits out has a purpose.

Academic papers could be vastly compressed to reduce cognitive load.

Brevity and intelligibility however is not a KPI. Self aggrandisement is.

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