Stop displaying journal names on your slides
A mentoring event at a scientific Congress called for better support of early-career scientists — but what followed sent mixed signals. This blog reflects on those moments and ends with a pledge: stop displaying journal names on your slides.
Inspiring the next generation
I didn’t attend the 20th Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions (MPMI) Congress in Cologne — but I heard that one of the standout moments was the satellite event “Building Careers in MPMI through Effective Mentoring.” This session, organized by early-career members of the plant-microbe interactions community — Ruby Tiwari (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center), Meenu Singla-Rastogi (Indiana University), and Jawahar Singh (University of Cambridge) — struck a chord.
Their message was clear: mentoring matters. Inspiring the next generation is the only way to keep our field, and science in general, fresh and alive. At the end of the day, our true legacy isn’t in the papers we publish or the impact factors we chase, but in the people we guide, support, and influence — whether they’re in our own labs or across the global research community.
The “hidden curriculum” of academia
As the organizers wrote in their event blurb: “As ECRs, we often struggle to find good mentors and get lost while navigating our careers.” That line sums up a sad reality of the academic experience. It is made worse by the so-called “hidden curriculum” issue — all the unspoken knowledge that helps someone thrive in academia: how to network, where to publish, how to preprint effectively, how to handle rejection, how to choose a mentor, navigate authorship, or even design a good slide. It’s the stuff no one teaches formally, yet it defines a fulfilling academic career.
I only recently heard of the hidden curriculum as a concept, during a rapid-fire talk by the science advocate Jess Wade at the John Innes Centre. Jess made the hidden curriculum the focus of her message. She explained how academic training isn’t evenly distributed. Whether or not you benefit from it often depends on something as arbitrary as what lab you join. Students and postdocs in nurturing, well-mentored groups often pick up these unspoken lessons naturally. Others — those who land in more indifferent or dysfunctional environments — are left guessing. That’s a real source of inequality in science, as Jess rightly pointed out.
(And by the way, you really shouldn’t just randomly land in a lab. If you’re at that stage, do yourself a favor and read How to select a host lab for your PhD? Terms & Conditions: applies to postdocs too.)
The irony, of course, is that Jess raised this point during a keynote at a Women in Wheat workshop for early-career researchers — an event brilliantly organized by the indefatigable Diane Saunders. That workshop, the MPMI mentoring event, and — why not — this blog too, are all attempts to chip away at the hidden curriculum. They create spaces where those of us with experience can share what we’ve learned, so that early-career scientists don’t have to rely solely on luck or proximity to the “right” mentor to access this kind of knowledge.
CNS worship in the The Church of Impact Factor
One of the most pervasive — and toxic — elements of the hidden curriculum is the obsession with journal prestige. Nowhere is this more visible than in the reverence for the so-called “CNS” journals: Cell, Nature, and Science. CNS worship is the academic version of religious fundamentalism — truth flows from elite gatekeepers, and only the chosen few are heard. The Church of Impact Factor reveres the Holy Trinity of Cell, Nature, and Science, where publication is canonization and dissent is heresy.
It’s the closest we get to academic orthodoxy, passed down through informal whispers and reinforced by slide decks, lab culture, and certain hiring decisions. And like any orthodoxy, it demands loyalty from its followers.
Which brings me back to the MPMI mentoring event. I wasn’t there, and my understanding is that the topic of publishing didn’t come up. However, I imagine the early-career scientists in the room left feeling uplifted, empowered — even hopeful.
But that hope didn’t last long.
Because soon after came the main congress, and with it, the keynote. As Worcester Professor Mahmut Tör summarized: The MPMI Congress opened with “Young researchers are our future.” Then the keynote hit us with a slide citing 22 papers — all from Science, Nature, and Cell. 😅 Over to you, young scientists!
That same slide left Abul Khayer, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute, “surprised, afraid, and confused.” The message was loud and clear: If you want to matter in this field, you better publish in the Holy Trinity. Which led Université Laval Professor Edel Pérez-López to comment: A clear message for young scientists: publish (CNS!) or perish — or at least, accept you may never be “one of us”.
The irony was hard to miss. One corner of the congress hall hosted a mentoring event emphasizing that healthy relationships and inclusive practices are the real drivers of success. Yet, just hours later, a keynote flashed a slide stacked with 22 CNS papers, implicitly signalling that prestige still reigns supreme.
“Young researchers are our future”
That opening line — “Young researchers are our future” — was meant to be inspirational. But it soon became the subject of cynical hallway conversations, WhatsApp threads, and private messages. The question kept surfacing: Was that really necessary?
Do senior figures, with all the stature and recognition anyone could ask for, really need to twist the knife by flashing a slide filled with journal names? How does this inspire the next generation ?
In the Church of Impact Factor, this kind of display is the academic equivalent of preaching from the pulpit: Behold the elect, chosen by the high priests of CNS. Aspire to be among them. But for most young scientists, this vision is not just unreachable — it’s irrelevant to the work they do, the questions they ask, or the communities they serve.
And when the science is brilliant — truly adding solid bricks to the edifice of scientific knowledge — does it really matter whether it appears in Nature or is preprinted on bioRxiv? In fact, the speed, accessibility, and transparency of bioRxiv might very well make it the more faithful vessel. As I wrote last week: Want to know which papers are flawed? It’s surprisingly simple. They’re the ones that never got preprinted — but somehow still landed in glamorous journals.
The MPMI Congress drew 1,300 researchers, most of them experts in the field of plant-microbe interactions. Must good science be ordained by a bishop-editor and their cabal of anonymous priest-reviewers? Can’t the MPMI experts recognize good science when they see it? Must all truth be filtered through the apostles of impact factor? As Edel Pérez-López wrote:
But here’s the truth: you can have an extraordinary career without ever publishing in Cell, Nature, or Science. Success is about finding your community, understanding how your work truly improves lives, and — above all — making a real difference to the people you mentor and support. Long after the papers are forgotten, your students will remember how you guided them, believed in them, and opened doors. That impact matters more than any journal cover.
There is a lot of crap in CNS journals
If the whole premise of CNS worship is to help us separate scientific good from evil, then let’s not kid ourselves: the system fails — frequently and visibly. Just like religious fundamentalism, which claims to deliver moral clarity but has led to scandals, cover-ups, war, terror, and genocide, the Church of Impact Factor is riddled with contradiction. It preaches purity but delivers plenty of junk.
I don’t need to remind readers of this blog — we’ve all seen it. Badly controlled experiments. Suspicious results. Data that looks a little too perfect. Outright fabrication. I could pick up any random issue of a CNS journal and point to papers with figures that wouldn’t make it past a half-decent lab meeting without raised eyebrows and tough questions.
Let’s stop pretending that prestige is a proxy for quality. It’s not
What to do? Stop displaying journal names on your slides
In Tunisia, where I grew up, there’s a concept known as siyāset el-marāhel (سياسة المراحل) — the politics of gradual steps. It was championed by the founding president of the republic, the legendary Habib Bourguiba. He believed that meaningful change doesn’t come from dramatic revolution, but from tireless, incremental reform. And he lived by it: Bourguiba’s early reforms — most notably in education and the Code du Statut Personnel — were groundbreaking. Granting women legal rights unmatched in the Arab world at the time was an act of bold, visionary leadership.
My mother, my aunts, my sister, my cousins — we all carry the legacy of those progressive reforms. They remind us that even small steps, when driven by principle and persistence, can shape the future.
So, what can we do to push back against the Church of Impact Factor? Here’s one small but powerful gesture: stop displaying journal names on your slides.
It’s been done before. At HHMI Janelia, for example, they’ve adopted a policy where speakers don’t list journal titles in their presentations. Instead, they provide identifiers like PMIDs — simple, neutral, and easy for the audience to jot down if they’re interested in the paper.
A small step? Sure. But still a step in the right direction. The kind of step that slowly chips away at the glam-journal obsession. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The pyramids were laid stone by stone. Reform doesn’t have to be loud to be lasting.
My pledge: Only PMIDs at the 21st MPMI Congress
Siyāset el-marāhel has been a guiding principle in my personal and professional life. Never lose sight of the long term. If you keep chipping away at things daily, time will be on your side. Just think of the pyramids — there’s only one way to build something that enduring: stone by stone.
So here’s my pledge: I advocate that speakers at any conference or seminar series focus on the science and avoid displaying journal names in their presentations. Specifically, at the next MPMI Congress in Jeju Island, Korea, I want to see a change. No more journal names on slides. Let’s instruct all speakers to follow the HHMI example and use PMIDs instead.
It’s a small step, yes. But it’s a meaningful one. And we owe it to the next generation to start doing something — anything — that shifts the culture toward one that values substance over status.
A quick postscript
On the point of how to cite papers on slides, let me clarify: I recommend using the author name, year and PMID — or the author name, year and bioRxiv if there’s no PMID yet. I do not recommend using DOIs or QR codes. One pushback I heard from (senior) colleagues is: “I can’t write down the DOI” or “I don’t want to use my phone to snap a photo.” Well, the PMID removes that excuse.
Acknowledgements
I thank Ruby Tiwari, Meenu Singla-Rastogi, and Jawahar Singh — the organizers of the Satellite meeting for taking the initiative. I’m also grateful to all those who expressed dismay whether in public or privately, and Abul Khayer, Edel Pérez-López, Sebastian Schornack, Jawahar Singh, and Mahmut Tör for commenting on an early draft. This post was written with assistance from ChatGPT. The legendary Peabody Hotel in Memphis, famous for its mallard ducks that hang out in the lobby, provided further inspiration.
This article is available on a CC-BY license via Zenodo. Cite as: Kamoun, S. (2025). Stop displaying journal names on your slides. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16276035
Appendix
“Our mentoring session was all about creating a culture where relationships and integrity matter more than prestige. If we keep telling ECRs that success equals chasing CNS papers, we undermine the very foundation of healthy mentorship.” — Jawahar Singh
