Abstract
Debates over the pros and cons of a “publish or perish” philosophy have inflamed academia for at least half a century. Growing concerns, in particular, are expressed for policies that reward “quantity” at the expense of “quality,” because these might prompt scientists to unduly multiply their publications by fractioning (“salami slicing”), duplicating, rushing, simplifying, or even fabricating their results. To assess the reasonableness of these concerns, we analyzed publication patterns of over 40,000 researchers that, between the years 1900 and 2013, have published two or more papers within 15 years, in any of the disciplines covered by the Web of Science. The total number of papers published by researchers during their early career period (first fifteen years) has increased in recent decades, but so has their average number of co-authors. If we take the latter factor into account, by measuring productivity fractionally or by only counting papers published as first author, we observe no increase in productivity throughout the century. Even after the 1980s, adjusted productivity has not increased for most disciplines and countries. These results are robust to methodological choices and are actually conservative with respect to the hypothesis that publication rates are growing. Therefore, the widespread belief that pressures to publish are causing the scientific literature to be flooded with salami-sliced, trivial, incomplete, duplicated, plagiarized and false results is likely to be incorrect or at least exaggerated.
Highlights
Ever since the early 20th century, academic lives and careers have been guided, first in the United States and later in other countries, by a “publish or perish” philosophy whose effects are increasingly controversial [1]
Our final sample consisted of a total of 760,323 papers published by 41,427 authors form all disciplines in the Web of Science (Mathematics N = 492, Earth and Space Science N = 1,604, Physics N = 2,193, Chemistry N = 3,531, Biology N = 3,247, Biomedical Research N = 5,551, Clinical Medicine N = 17,928, Psychology N = 657, Social Sciences N = 1,103, Arts and Humanities N = 1,114, Other (i.e. Professional Fields+Health+Engineering and Technology) N = 3,524)
We analysed individual publication profiles of over 40,000 scientists whose first recorded paper appeared in the Web of Science database between the years 1900 and 1998, and who published two or more papers within the first fifteen years of activity—an “early-career” phase in which pressures to publish are believed to be high
Summary
Ever since the early 20th century, academic lives and careers have been guided, first in the United States and later in other countries, by a “publish or perish” philosophy whose effects are increasingly controversial [1]. Already in the 1950s, academics were publically disputing that, whilst publishing promptly one’s results is a duty for all researchers, setting explicit productivity expectations was a recipe for disaster [2]. “salami slicing” data sets to the smallest publishable unit), surreptitiously re-using data in multiple publications, duplicating their papers, publishing results that are preliminary or incomplete, underemphasizing limitations, making exaggerated claims and even resorting to data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism e.g.[6,7,8,9,10]. Research evaluation policies in scientifically prominent countries have reacted to these concerns by derewarding productivity. In The Netherlands, the national research assessment exercise has revised its policies and has dropped the “productivity” category, which counted total number of publications, from its ranking system [12]
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