Pressure to Publish

Guest: Jacob Foster, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles Big discoveries – the kind that win Nobel Prizes and end up in textbooks – come from asking big questions, often in a realm others have yet to explore. Flip open a scientific journal, though, and most of what you’ll see is far more mundane: researchers building on each other’s work, incrementally expanding our understanding of established science. Why do relatively few scientists set their sights on the big questions?