Least publishable unit

Okay kiddo, so sometimes when grown-ups do research they find out a lot of things, but they don't always want to write big long papers about all of it. Sometimes they just want to write a little bit about one part of it, like a teeny tiny piece of the puzzle.

That's where the "least publishable unit" comes in. It means the smallest little bit of research that is still interesting and important enough to be worth writing and getting published somewhere.

It's kind of like if you were drawing a big picture and you had a lot of little pictures inside of it. Sometimes you might just want to show one of those little pictures by itself because it's really cool or pretty or interesting. That little picture would be like the "least publishable unit" of your big picture.

Does that make sense, kiddo?