Putting a Price on Publishing: The Shadow Value of a Paper (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, Professor Stuckler here. What is a publication really worth? Is it priceless? $500? $5,000? A whole career shift? Today, we're going to try to put a number on it using a concept that the economists call a shadow price. If you're new to the channel, I've been a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, and I made this channel to help you learn from a lot of the mistakes I made along the way as a researcher. And today's video, really, the genesis of it was a conversation I had with a graduate student who's asking me, well, should I try to publish my thesis? Or I had a really good mark, is it worth going the distance? It's a really difficult question. I get it a lot where people can see maybe the hardship that they think it might take to publish, but they don't have a full sense of what that benefit might be in commensurate terms so they can make a really informed decision. And the benefits of publication are pretty tangible. Now, they do vary by your field, your career stage, and where you're trying to go. But these are serious concrete benefits. Let me list out a few of them for you. One is to help you win competitive research funding. That's why academics often say publications are like money in the bank. So for fiercely competitive scholarship applications, having that line on your CV of a published paper really can help you stand out among the crowd. And I've seen, and many of the researchers I've worked with, having those publications sets them apart and helps them win scholarships. This is especially the case for funded PhDs and postdocs. Some of these positions are a bit like a job where you need to produce. And in the case of a PhD, they need to be confident you can finish. You know what you're getting yourself into. Having a publication shows you already bring some skills to the table and that you're serious. The other part can come through competitive research fellowships, residency positions for doctors. These, again, they are looking for ways to eliminate you. And having that extra publication means you bring to the table something. You have objective evidence demonstrating that you can do this that others just don't have. For academic promotions and for grants, these are often the direct evaluation criteria they look for. For grants, we often speak of cashing in on your publications because if you write a grant proposal and you haven't published at all in the topic, you're probably going to get blown out of the water. Don't even really think about writing a grant until you've published on the topic before. On the other side, for industry and even outside academia stuff, there can also be a series of benefits. So one, there can be industry roles that want to see that you're an expert at something. Again, publication is that proof of concept. It shows you actually know the techniques, you know how to do something at a very high level, commanding mastery in your field. I've even worked with some researchers that need to tick the boxes for visa requirements, that they are experts, that are coveted, and that makes a justification for why a country might want to let them in. And publications are proof. Their scientific credibility, especially if your PhD might not be in the country, from the country you're wishing to go to, those publications really do establish you and cement your status as an international expert in an area. And along that theme of expertise, publications get you invited, get you on that proverbial fast track. They get you invited to conferences to speak. They get you in publishing and research and even policy networks so they can lead to collaborations. And that leads to some of the more intangible things. The esteem, the status, that respect you feel when you walk into a room, that gets a little bit harder to put a price on. What about having that publishing superpower, to know that you can make the journey from an idea to pushing the forefront of your field? Again, having that ability to publish and get your ideas out there is transformative in a way that really is hard to put a direct price on. So that leads us into, well, how are we actually going to try to put a number on this, the idea of a shadow price? So economists have many ways, but two broad ways that they follow to try to quantify something that doesn't always have a direct market price. They do this for things like clean air. Well, how much is clean air worth? Or they might do this for avoiding a disease. Well, how much is it worth to avoid diabetes? And the main ways they try to do this are around revealed preference and willingness to pay. Revealed preference is just like it sounds. You see how much people value something through their actions. And we do know that people give up a lot. They sacrifice a lot for papers. So it must be worth something. People miss weekends. They miss holidays. They don't spend time with their kids or their family. They have sleepless nights. They're stressed out trying to get papers done. That tells us that for them, it really is quite worth a lot because of what they're willing to give up to try to get it. They even, in some cases, will pay for training courses to go on to try to master this craft of publishing. In other cases, there's revealed preferences that maybe are going to be less useful for us and less useful for you. So people who pay to publish as a scam, that misses out all those valuable intangible benefits and leaves you exposed. Guys, don't ever do that. And those prices really vary quite a bit. I don't think that's useful information for us. There are some universities that will also pay people for publishing because that helps contribute to the university status. But again, that's probably more relevant to academics. And that varies a lot by field and by specific universities. And those bonuses can range anywhere I've seen from the order of $3,000 to $50,000. So again, that revealed preference is helpful, but it's not really going to answer the question for the most important people here, which is you, the members and subscribers of this community who might want to know and might be grappling with the same kind of tough decision of, is it really worth going that extra mile to get publications? How much blood, sweat, and tears should I be sacrificing to be able to get that prize and that line on my resume? So that brings us to the second approach, willingness to pay, which is a little more direct. How much would you be willing to pay? How much is it really worth it for you to get this publication? And so what we did was, like good researchers, we did a survey and we asked you, my YouTube followers, what you thought. So I'm happy here, again, with the caveats. It's not really representative of the whole world, but it is representative of you, our viewers. So this is probably going to be the closest correlate to your experience that we could map out. So let's take a look at what the data show. So I've got the results of the poll from my channel right here. I left it running for quite a bit of time to get as many results as I could. And what you can see of the distribution, we have about a third who says between zero and a thousand dollars, a little boost, but not huge. And on the other extreme, we've got about another 30% who says priceless, no amount of money can capture its true value. And the rest were somewhat sandwiched in between, between a thousand dollars to $5,000 or $5,000 plus it can open major doors. And that makes a lot of sense. Again, depending on where you are in your career, some of those real tangible benefits might apply to you. And that probably puts you in that category of the $5,000 plus it can open major doors. But if others of you are maybe just thinking about going into industry and you don't need to prove that specialized expertise, then maybe you end up more in the camp of a little boost, but not huge. But especially for the health sciences and medicine, that's at the upper end of those benefits, especially those on academic track, I'd suspect you're on the upper end of those benefits. Again, this is the only time I've ever seen this question really try to be answered in a serious way. So take it with a pinch of salt for all its limitations. But that priceless, I want to reflect on that for a moment, that 28% of you said that is priceless. And that's really speaking to that inner transformation, that ability to think in more clear, precise terms, that self-respect when you look in the mirror, and that esteem among your colleagues when you walk in the room, that really is priceless. And I can tell you, I wouldn't give up anything for the ability that I have to dissect tough questions and figure out how to answer them. This has transformed every aspect of my life, from how I engage in sports, to relationships, to again, this channel and how I try to help others publish. So what do you think? Let me know in the comments below, or actually head to our poll and go vote on it. I'd love to get more insights from you, our viewer community. And what's missing here is a discussion of the costs. Because great, okay, so we can see that for about half of our respondents, the value is $5,000 or more, or even priceless. But what about the cost to actually get it? And that's exactly why I created the Fast Track Mentorship Program, to help lower those costs to getting from where you are to publishing. And most of our programs aim to get you from where you're sitting right now to a publishable manuscript in under three months, with a step-by-step program that cuts the fluff and takes you in a straight line to publication mastery. If that's something that's potentially interesting to you, and you'd like to see these benefits resonate with you, and you'd like to see what publishing can bring, I'd encourage you to click the link below, set up a no-pressure call, and let's see if we're a good fit to work together. And look, you're probably going to want to see what's in my next video right here on our How to Write a Paper step-by-step playlist, which is going to start sharing some of our insider tips and our secret formulas for publishing. You're not going to want to miss this. I'll see you in the next video.