And, not or: Quality, quantity in scientific publishing

被引:30
|
作者
Michalska-Smith, Matthew J. [1 ]
Allesina, Stefano [1 ,2 ,3 ]
机构
[1] Univ Chicago, Dept Ecol & Evolut, Chicago, IL 60637 USA
[2] Univ Chicago, Computat Inst, Chicago, IL 60637 USA
[3] Northwestern Univ, Northwestern Inst Complex Syst, Evanston, IL 60208 USA
来源
PLOS ONE | 2017年 / 12卷 / 06期
基金
美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
SELF-CITATION; SCIENCE; IMPACT; PRODUCTIVITY; OBSESSION; JOURNALS;
D O I
10.1371/journal.pone.0178074
中图分类号
O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];
学科分类号
07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;
摘要
Scientists often perceive a trade-off between quantity and quality in scientific publishing: finite amounts of time and effort can be spent to produce few high-quality papers or subdivided to produce many papers of lower quality. Despite this perception, previous studies have indicated the opposite relationship, in which productivity (publishing more papers) is associated with increased paper quality (usually measured by citation accumulation). We examine this question in a novel way, comparing members of the National Academy of Sciences with themselves across years, and using a much larger dataset than previously analyzed. We find that a member's most highly cited paper in a given year has more citations in more productive years than in in less productive years. Their lowest cited paper each year, on the other hand, has fewer citations in more productive years. To disentangle the effect of the underlying distributions of citations and productivities, we repeat the analysis for hypothetical publication records generated by scrambling each author's citation counts among their publications. Surprisingly, these artificial histories re-create the above trends almost exactly. Put another way, the observed positive relationship between quantity and quality can be interpreted as a consequence of randomly drawing citation counts for each publication: more productive years yield higher-cited papers because they have more chances to draw a large value. This suggests that citation counts, and the rewards that have come to be associated with them, may be more stochastic than previously appreciated.
引用
收藏
页数:12
相关论文
共 50 条
  • [1] Quality or quantity? Historic and current trends in scientific publishing
    Salthammer, Tunga
    [J]. INDOOR AIR, 2016, 26 (03) : 347 - 349
  • [2] QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS
    ROSSET, R
    [J]. ANALUSIS, 1985, 13 (09) : 393 - 393
  • [3] Quantity and/or Quality? The Importance of Publishing Many Papers
    Sandstrom, Ulf
    van den Besselaar, Peter
    [J]. PLOS ONE, 2016, 11 (11):
  • [4] THE QUALITY CRITERIA AND SELF-PUBLISHING IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING
    Mangas-Vega, Almudena
    Gomez-Diaz, Raquel
    [J]. ANALES DE DOCUMENTACION, 2015, 18 (02):
  • [5] Quality: The eternal goal of scientific publishing
    Kumar, Rajeev
    [J]. INDIAN JOURNAL OF UROLOGY, 2024, 40 (01) : 1 - 2
  • [6] Achieving and maintaining quality in scientific publishing
    Dancik, BP
    [J]. MARINE ECOLOGY PROGRESS SERIES, 2004, 270 : 268 - 270
  • [7] Quality versus quantity in scientific impact
    Kaur, Jasleen
    Ferrara, Emilio
    Menczer, Filippo
    Flammini, Alessandro
    Radicchi, Filippo
    [J]. JOURNAL OF INFORMETRICS, 2015, 9 (04) : 800 - 808
  • [8] QUALITY OUTRANKS QUANTITY IN SCIENTIFIC MANPOWER NEEDS
    HALLETT, M
    [J]. ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, 1961, 33 (10) : 1297 - &
  • [9] The quantity and quality of scientific graphs in pharmaceutical advertisements
    Richelle J. Cooper
    David L. Schriger
    Roger C. Wallace
    Vladislav J. Mikulich
    Michael S. Wilkes
    [J]. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2003, 18 : 294 - 297
  • [10] Research evaluation and scientific publications: Quantity or quality?
    Fischer, A.
    [J]. BULLETIN DE L ACADEMIE NATIONALE DE MEDECINE, 2022, 206 (07): : 898 - 901