>>12698975>31>several first authors>a dozen middle authorsTrust me OP, it's self-servicing "gimme-gimme" masturbation that you will get over real quick and is not worth it
Academia is horse-shit that portrays itself as holier-than-thou and progressive while having worse labor protections and conditions than a minimum wage hamburger flipper (ask PIs why they don't support basic workers rights in their labs, and they'll stammer away something about "difficult to do science like that...." while ignoring the fact that biotech operates exactly that way)
Publishing in the old days used to be fun. Get a few experiments together, have an idea/cool finding, have some mysteries, and publish. Exciting. Share your work with the world. It was okay for it to be only a few experiments, as long as it was cool. Look at the nobel-prize winning mouse transgene paper; it was short as hell, and plenty of "I dunno's" added in.
Now, its a powercreep hell. To publish, you have to basically discover a new thing, figure out how it works in cells, and build a mouse model to figure out how it works in vivo before publishing. It's fucking horrifying. and don't you DARE say "we don't know" in the paper, at any point, or instant rejection. Unlike classic papers in literature, where they were allowed to express wonder and unknowing all the time.
It's an absolute nightmare to publish. You will spend months and soul-sucking months to write, re-write, and re-write your paper over and over and over, submitting, rejection, submitting, rejection, before finally getting it through. You never want to look at your paper ever again by the time it comes out.
Trust me, the PhD and publishing is stupid shit. Only egoists continue into academia, because it celebrates the individual, not the work or the science. People recognize names, not concepts.
I moved into biotech and I've never been happier. "There is no HR in academia" is a common saying.
