Abstract
Researchers in Europe are increasingly assessed by their publication metrics. To uncover the effect of quantitative assessment on the publication strategies of clinical researchers in Denmark, we interviewed 9 senior researchers at the Department of Clinical Research at the University of Southern Denmark with the lowest and highest values for a, as defined by Hirsch. Our aim is to investigate the importance of these metrics to their academic careers: h-index, number of publications, number of citations, international collaborations, local collaborations, field specific journal publishing and high journal impact factor publishing. To validate our findings we compared their publication record to their statistically analyzed stated publication strategy. Our results indicate two styles of publication strategy used by these senior researchers. Researchers with Low a engage in local collaborations, disseminate knowledge in local media and publish in field specific journals, while researchers with High a engage in international collaborations, invest significant time in publishing in the highest impact journals in their field, and acquire a greater number of citations. Both publication strategies can lead to a successful academic career, yet we have an indication through the h5-index that the practices of the High a group are more likely to nudge the h-index.
Highlights
Researchers in Europe are occupied with a wide range of tasks outside of research, such as teaching, managing projects, curating data, and writing funding applications to name a few, which limits their time to perform research and write publications
When researchers are judged by the absolute value of their publication metrics, conflicting incentives come into play [1]
We focus on the h-index, h, as it is widely used to rank academics [29,30,31,32] and group researchers by the degree of efficiency, a, where a = NC/h2 as taken from Hirsch 2005 [29], and support a qualitative investigation of the publishing practices of a group of clinical researchers, based on semi-structured interviews, with a quantitative investigation of their publication metrics
Summary
Researchers in Europe are occupied with a wide range of tasks outside of research, such as teaching, managing projects, curating data, and writing funding applications to name a few, which limits their time to perform research and write publications. When it comes to scholarly communication, one’s focus should be on the dissemination of knowledge. A researcher could be working in a trending field due to personal interest, ease of funding, or because they believe their publications are more likely to get into high impact journals [3]. A researcher could be writing guidelines and reviews, citing their own work several times in each
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