Dear All,

It is hard to imagine the value of time and motion studies for research publications or for writing books or journal articles. The claim that “six revisions was optimal for successful research publications” makes no sense to me.

We can measure how long it takes to write an average journal article or conference paper. Perhaps we can count the number of drafts required. But we measure the success of researchpublications in their impact, not the simple fact that they were published or presented.

Most journal articles are never cited. A study published in Science two decades ago showed that only 45 per cent or so of all articles in the top five thousand journals were citedwithin five years after publication. The majority, 55 per cent were never cited once. If we were to cover all journals rather than the high impact journals, the numbers would shrink further. This has worsened in recent years. A study a couple of years back showed that only 40 per cent or so of all articles in leading science and social science journals are cited. Nearly 60 per cent are not cited. Not once. Again, the greater the base of journals, the smaller the percentage of articles cited. Even fewer conference papers are cited than journal articles.

What do we mean by a “successful research publication”? We’d need to know how often the “6-revision” research publications in Terry Love’s study were cited to know if they were successful.

There is a difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency involves amount of output per unit of input. Effectiveness involves significant results.

Many people seem to measure research success in numbers of articles published or papers presented. The purpose of these publications seems to involve statistics – faculty statistics, university statistics, national research agenda statistics. But the number of articlespublished does not indicate success. The real measure is – and should be – impact. This requires publishing ideas that contribute to the field.

Let’s look at Don Norman’s inefficient but highly effective “twenty-draft” approach.

According to Google Scholar, The Design of Everyday Things (Norman 2002) has been cited over 5,362 times. These citations come in addition to the 4,131 cites that the book garnered under its earlier title, The Psychology of Everyday Things (Norman 1988).

Let’s use Don’s estimate of 20 drafts. At 9,493 citations, Don has acquired 475 citations per draft.

This is far better than the vast majority of “successful research publications.” Most of these are never cited at all. With 60% of journal articles never cited and what must be more than 90% of conference papers never cited, there’s no way to get an accurate statistical representation of the “6-draft” optimum. What is clear is that widely cited and highly successful authors seek effective publications rather than efficient publications. It’s not the number of successful scientific publications that count, but the significance of what they publish.

Back in the 1960s, I came to the conclusion that symphonic music was highly inefficient. In the search for rational music, I spent years looking for a way to save the time and motion wasted when musicians performed work by such composers as Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. It took years of intensive testing to find the answer, but I kept at it, publishing my method in 1987 (See: Friedman 2009: 131).

To create efficient orchestration, start with the score of any symphony or musical work. Organize the symphony in such a way that all notes of any given kind are played consecutively. For example, take all instances of the note B?. Then, assemble all B? notes in series by time value, so that whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, etc. are played consecutively. Structure the entire series of notes in the symphony in this way, then perform them in sequence.

It’s possible to refine the system further. Instead of repeating all the instances of a B? whole note in Don Giovanni, for example, it’s enough to play the B? whole note once, followed by a half note, a quarter note, and so on. By my calculations, an orchestra can realize a savings of 83% on B? notes alone. When you factor the entire scale, the savings are simply astonishing.

With the salaries of symphony players rising every year, greater efficiency is amust. Take the principal oboe chair at the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. QSO is advertising the chair at $83,547 to $87,350 including superannuation up to 9%, plus allowances. They are paying$57,766 to $72,137 for double bass section players, and so on. By the time you’re up to and orchestras large enough to play opera, costs are through the roof. The more symphonies and operas the orchestra can perform each season, the more productive they will be – with greater ticket sales and increased revenues to justify the salaries.


Very few orchestras were willing to try my system in the 1980s. They were committed to their libraries of scores and stuck in old, inefficient performance techniques. Arranging the scores would also have been expensive, since I developed this method before composition software made the process of musical notation simple. Today’s computerized music software allows us to score direct from keyboard input, and I imagine that one can scan music to do arrangements by reorganizing the notation. This is an idea whose time has probably come.

Despite the extraordinary efficiency gains we can realize in symphonic music, however, I don’t think we’ll be able to realize these advantages by using the 6-draft method for research publishing. Unlike music, which we can easily computerize, writing remains an art. It will be some time before we can get Don’s brain into a vat.

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | www.swinburne.edu.au/design

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Reference

Friedman, Ken. 2009. 99 Events. New York: Stendhal Gallery. Permanent link: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/65020

Norman, Donald A. 1988. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

Norman, Donald A. 2002. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

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Terry Love wrote:

—snip—

For what it’s worth, a time and motion study on academic researcher activities I did in 2001 seemed to indicate six revisions was optimal for successful research publications....More than six revisions seemed to be a waste of time.

—snip—

Don Norman wrote:

—snip—

It is not possible to define a draft, at least for my writing, because i am always writing, so when by body tells me it is time to write a book, I start with hundreds or even thousands of pages of already written text that is sorted, edited, discarded, and repurposed.

—snip—

A technical paper is very different than a popular trade book. Technical paper authors seldom make their text easy to read or even easy to understand. And even for that small sample of people who do, they assume an educated, sophisticated audience. For trade books, understanding is critical, and the audience is assumed to have no prior knowledge of the content matter.

—snip—