Loose end

old list of publications is just not good enough when looking for a job or applying for grants. Candidates' publications are now subjected to microscopic scrutiny but unfortunately not for their scientific content. What is looked for is with whom you write papers and where these are finally published. Today, God would never get a research grant. One member of the committee would deny it on the grounds that the work had been done a long time ago; a second would confirm this by noting that it had never been repeated. Rejection would be clinched by a third member pointing out that, to top it all, the work was published in an unrefereed journal. There is also good evidence that most authors citing the paper have never actually read it but simply copied it from the references of another paper. I once went to look up one such paper and could not find it, because a mutation had occurred in the page number at one point in a readily traceable lineage.