No one said zero publishable results. Besides, to get to the stage of a publishing scientist (I mean a primary investigator) you have gone through a Bsc, Msc (maybe published, but definitely a thesis), phD (usually 1+ publications), post docs (at least 1 which may last between 6months and 5 years, and would be expected to publish), a probation period at a University/Research Institute or other organization (where you would be expected to publish).

So if you make it through that entire process and are incapable of publishing, the entire system failed you.

That is the argument, but when those with more publications get more funding than those with better publications, the drive is to produce more.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still good publications out there, but the incentives and pressures move the needle to the quantity side. How do you measure goodness? I dont know. But what we are doing now isn’t working, which is evidenced by, well how everything is going at the moment.

Of course we could moralize it and say something like “ohh well scientists are just greedier and lazier than they used to be” but that is thought terminating and no solution can be found that way.

As someone within that community: it demonstrates the “publish or perish” mindset. Without enough publications it becomes impossible to get funding to do your research. Thus, the incentives are there for producing more publications and not better research.

Unsurprisingly, encouraging greater throughput results in greater throughput. And without proper support quality suffers. For example, a large portion of research is done by underpaid graduate students.