Source: www.nature.com/news/2011/110410/full/news.2011.223.html
Quotes:
“The professors are predominantly men, and they seek out other men to be their assistants and successors. The men have excellent networking systems, and the unwritten rules of the academic game have been designed by them. It is no surprise, then, that men dominate academic committees, and continue to perpetuate themselves in academia.”
“It is an opportunity for us to identify our research strengths and decide where we want to create a major research focus – and what infrastructures should support them. It’s also an opportunity to try to recreate the Humboldtian philosophy that teaching and research should be closely connected. Economy-driven demands have made many of us lose touch with these principles.”
“We have to take off the pressure. Scientists are expected to generate floods of papers to get grants or promotion. That doesn’t always give them time to do thorough science, to replicate their data properly and perform the necessary quality control before publication. It doesn’t give them enough time to think. Also, most journals do not have the time to impose good quality control. … If you think about it, even top scientists don’t normally have more than five really ground-breaking papers to their name. But in clinical research you are often expected to have more than five papers a year. How could that be possible if you have true quality control?”