(1) Authors may be divided into three classes – shooting stars, planets, and fixed stars. Arthur Schopenhauer: Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851 How brightly should you shine, and for how long? At appointments committees lists of publications are becoming increasingly important as proxy measures of candidates' abilities and potential. As competition for posts becomes fiercer, number and quality of publications are likely to assume even greater importance when similarly qualified individuals are being compared. We may bemoan this trend but in the absence of other more valid indicators of worth and from the point of view of self-interest it would be prudent to acknowledge it and to support it.

Some jargon is useful. Though I invariably place inverted commas around ‘caseness’, just so that everybody knows that I know that it is jargon, I would be a lost man if I diligently replaced it with a statement to the effect that this particular patient has achieved an index of definition of 5 or over on the Present State Examination.