Chmess and Academic Research – A Personal Take

Imagine there is a game of chess. But there is just one different rule. Instead of moving 1 square, the king?can now move two squares. This would lead to a totally different game, strategies, tactics, openings, and defences. ?Let us call this game “Chmess”. It is introduced to the world, and suddenly, there is a glut of writing and thoughts on the game. Multiple research papers are written, and?there are views and counter-views written. Publications come out and special issues and entire conferences are announced surrounding the concept of “Chmess” at all you luxurious hotels and cosy resorts around the world.

It’s a great exercise, but unlike chess, no games or tournaments are announced for chess. So, is it actually worthwhile? Prof Daniel Dennett posed this question in his paper “Higher-Order Truths About Chmess " (it's available in the public domain easily). The paper was written as an advisory to undergraduate students looking to pursue philosophy. It tells them to avoid participating in such games or associating with academics pursuing chmess.

When I left my corporate industry research position in July 2018, I had my mind set on an academic career. I had offers even interviews from a few companies which I refused. Academic research gives you a lot of freedom and on the surface since you are serving mainly your interest, you ought to be happy. Except, that is not the case. You may have heard a line “publish of perish” which highlights the constant need to output research papers into preferably highly reputable journals or risk losing, funding, academic perks or even your job.

Scientific publishing is pretty broken and a victim of the chmess phenomenon I would argue. And no, none of this comes from my struggles with getting published (that is a rite of passage in this field) but more from what journals have become more recently. If you are a researcher within the business management and economics domain, chances are you feel like journals are moving at light speed and you are being left behind. What finding was novel in Jan of 2024, is now automatically poor in March 2024 even if you used a novel way to reach it.

The parallels to my work as an industry research analyst are way more common than I expected. When I worked in?corporate, I was always pushed to move forward quickly. The unstated rule to me was, “He who is first with some fact matters the most.” Almost every day felt like running towards the last bogie of a moving train; other analysts felt like invisible wraiths who were chasing me, whom I had to beat, no matter what. Academic research feels to a relatively lesser degree like the same. And I think I can hypothesize a reason for the same.

Academic publishing is, ultimately, a for-profit enterprise collectively controlled by a surprisingly small number of publishers (I refer to the prestigious journals, not the predatory ones). Reviewers are not paid, and more people want to get published than review something. There has always been a need to stay in touch with industry in the business and management space in academic research. As there are less reviewers and revenues have to go up, publishers have to devise new methods. For example, publishing papers in open access, having frequent special issues on trendier and “hype” topics. ?

This ultimately leads to narrowing the streams on which research is concentrated. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an eruption of articles exploring the topic. Now that the pandemic is over, the topic is somewhat passe despite the fact that data from the pandemic years will actually become cleaner and more reliable as time goes on. Slow research is, in a way, being disincentivised. To become a professor, you need papers, those papers must look at trending topics for higher odds to get published, you end up researching in a narrow area which may not interest you. The cycle is very akin to the ouroboros – the snake biting down its own tail to become circular.

Multiple people far more qualified than me, have written about the broken nature of scientific research and publishing for a while now. Ironically the need to produce more industry relevant and applicable research might actually be leading to research work which is not only less replicable (as has been noted by every one) but might be less applicable. Or akin to work around Chmess.