Abstract
The biological sciences have experienced a significant increase in journals and hence in publications in recent decades. The increasing number of research contributions reflects the “publish-or-perish” culture of science. The resulting pressure to publish may affect the publishing and working behaviour of researchers. However, the pressure to publish and the satisfaction while publishing scientific results may vary between genders and across career stages. Little effort has been taken to understand how scientists are affected by this pressure and how it may differ among groups of scientists. Therefore, we anonymously interviewed almost 1000 scientists from the field of the biological sciences, including female and male researchers at all career stages, to investigate potential negative effects of the pressure to publish, but also positive feelings (i.e. satisfaction) resulting from publishing. We assessed basic personal attributes (i.e. age, gender, career stage), and the personal attitude and feeling towards publishing. Our data indicates that “publicationism”, an index of stress arising from the pressure to publish, depends on age and gender. Female scientists suffered stronger from publicationism (publicationism score=2.577) than male scientists (score=2.364). Publicationism decreased with increasing age (drop of 0.19 index points), and was more intense for scientists from the United States (score=2.91) than for Germans (score=2.20). Most scientists felt satisfied when contributing to science by publishing their work and satisfaction lasted longer with increasing age. Our data show a weak negative correlation between publicationism and satisfaction. Thus, publishing in the biological sciences produces an ambivalent situation, which positively stimulates older, experienced scientists, but which may stress young researchers, in particular females. Publicationism further depends on the academic system and employer of the scientist.
Highlights
Career perspectives in science are currently strongly driven by publication pressure as a result of the ongoing publishor-perish policy
The publication metrics, the pressure to publish and science policy strongly affect the way scientists work today: long-term studies have become rare as they do not provide fast research output, more time is allocated for writing articles rather than conducting experiments and analyses, and researchers start splitting scientific data into smaller sub-sets to fulfil the goal of publishing a large number of articles in constant search of the “least-publishable” unit (McCallum and McCallum, 2006; Dupps and Randleman, 2012; Grossman, 2014)
The analyses of our survey data targeting publication behaviour of researchers in biological sciences suggested that publishing scientific findings generally results in positive feelings
Summary
Career perspectives in science are currently strongly driven by publication pressure as a result of the ongoing publishor-perish policy. The publication metrics, the pressure to publish and science policy strongly affect the way scientists work today: long-term studies have become rare as they do not provide fast research output, more time is allocated for writing articles rather than conducting experiments and analyses, and researchers start splitting scientific data into smaller sub-sets to fulfil the goal of publishing a large number of articles in constant search of the “least-publishable” unit (McCallum and McCallum, 2006; Dupps and Randleman, 2012; Grossman, 2014) This strong publication pressure may lead to less innovative research (Foster et al, 2015) and increasing scientific misconduct has been identified and interpreted as one result of ongoing publication pressure (Fang et al, 2012). Besides its negative effects on the quality and credibility of science, the constant pressure may lead to serious psychological problems for many scientists (e.g., the impostor syndrome, Woolston, 2016)
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