Do ya love SCIENCE? Well, DO? YA?

[Kai]

"Publish or die" sums up everything that is wrong with academia.

Which is such a joke because High Impact journals are the ones that are cited the most and do not necessarily contain any groundbreaking research. Impact factor is a demeaning and dehumanizing statistic, where all scientists, all academics, really, are reduced to: Σ(first authorship x impact factor of journal). While described usually as "the higher the number, the more your research is worth", it more often turns out to be "the lower the number, the more worthless you are as a researcher, scientist and human being".

[Cain]

Thucydides didn't publish a paper every three damn months.  He didn't even submit his treatise to a recognised journal.  Instead, he took years, and, as he intended, did not write "an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time."

He's still being cited 2,400 years later.  Most academics wont even be cited in 20 years.

[Kai]

Thucydides didn't publish a paper every three damn months.  He didn't even submit his treatise to a recognised journal.  Instead, he took years, and, as he intended, did not write "an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time."

He's still being cited 2,400 years later.  Most academics wont even be cited in 20 years.

Absolutely. And it's more than just original research, it's synthesis. The best works of natural history I know are called monographs, which is a very apt term because they attempt to investigate a single taxonomic group (e.g. family or genus) of organisms and, along with their recent research, include EVERYTHING every written about the group, all the biogeographic, taxonomic, systematic, behavioral, etc, information known. These are lifetime achievements, and they stand the test of time and elevate a person to world renowned. Darwin's Monograph of Cirripedia (barnacles) is one excellent example. His recognition for that massive piece of work allowed him to present his controversial theory of natural selection and actually be taken seriously. Without the barnacle monograph, On the Origin of Species may never have happened, or may have been treated like Lamarck's writings. A more recent example is the Monograph of Cimicidae by Robert Usinger. Published in 1966, it is now being read and cited in large numbers due to the resurgence of bed bugs in North America. It's the bed bug bible, and it will probably be THE guide on cimicids for a very long time.

These publications do not have impact factors because they aren't published in journals; only recently are there journals such as Zootaxa which will publish large monographs as part of the standard issue. But their impact is higher than any Nature publication by far.