Editorial - Publication and Promotion: Call for Breaking the Link

If I may take the liberty of rephrasing Shakespeare's words, `The spoken word is often buried with one's bones - it is the written word that lives long after'. This is particularly true in the field of academic medicine where a person's progress is mainly judged by the number of papers he has published. The key words here are `number of publications'. Very little if any emphasis is laid on the quality of these publications and on whether they have contributed in any way to the advancement of scientific knowledge.