Researchers' Individual Publication Rate Has Not Increased in a Century.
Researchers' Individual Publication Rate Has Not Increased in a Century.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0149504
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Larivière V
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fanelli D;Larivière V
至少半个世纪以来，关于“出版或灭亡”哲学利弊的争论已经激怒了学术界。人们尤其对那些以牺牲“质量”为代价奖励“数量”的政策表示了越来越多的担忧，因为这可能会促使科学家通过分割（“萨拉米切片”）、重复、仓促、简化甚至捏造结果来过度增加出版物。为了评估这些担忧的合理性，我们分析了 40,000 多名研究人员的发表模式，这些研究人员在 1900 年至 2013 年间，在 15 年内发表了两篇或更多论文，涉及 Web of Science 涵盖的任何学科。近几十年来，研究人员在职业生涯早期（前十五年）发表的论文总数有所增加，但他们的共同作者的平均数量也有所增加。如果我们考虑到后一个因素，通过分数衡量生产力或仅计算作为第一作者发表的论文，我们观察到整个世纪生产力没有增加。即使在 20 世纪 80 年代之后，大多数学科和国家的调整后生产率也没有提高。这些结果对于方法选择来说是稳健的，并且对于发表率正在增长的假设实际上是保守的。因此，人们普遍认为，发表的压力导致科学文献中充斥着不切实际的、琐碎的、不完整的、重复的、抄袭的和虚假的结果，这种观点可能是不正确的，或者至少是夸大的。
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.