Small Talk:
Since Taiwan’s academia introduced quantitative evaluation metrics in 2000, countless university faculty members have been pushing themselves to the limit, mass-producing research papers.
Some professors have not only transformed into paper-manufacturing machines but have practically opened up "paper mills," reducing the students they advise to mere factory workers trapped in this relentless rat race of publication counts. In this fierce publishing competition, some professors use some specific graduate students' theses as cookie-cutter templates.
They then force subsequent generations of students to follow the exact templates, altering nothing but variables like the research subjects or locations, while copying and pasting the rest of the content entirely.
I once read a friend’s thesis that was practically a carbon copy of a senior classmate’s work, with the only difference being the target population.
Quite apart from whether such practices violate research ethics, what is the true purpose of doing research? Is it just a means to secure a diploma and boost one’s income? Is it merely to artificially inflate output to survive in the university tenure system? Or is it genuinely to pursue the truth and provide valuable insights for the public? I believe this is a fundamental question that every researcher must deeply ask themselves.
