Hi, Carlos,
It is worth bringing up this issue of motivations in class and discuss it. I agree with the notion that the pressure to publish is an important one. A solution is less reliance on the number of publications and more on the quality or the importance of the subject and what is achieved by the research, but this is hard to measure. I have come across researchers publishing repetitive experiments or pursuing “salami publishing” in even well-known journals just to increase the number of articles. I think it is the journal reviewer/editors’ task to filter similar works and ask the writer to archive them in another way. This may encourage focusing on new solutions for new problems. We can talk a more about this during the class.