Read on Twitter
So, as you may have seen, there's a little bit of a twitter storm brewing over an individual who has published a huge number of papers over a short period of time...
I didn't want to comment, as it seemed a bit unfair to single out one individual for what often seems to me like a very widespread problem...
... but apparently the academic in question regards his approach as being normative; and this is what is so distressing and frustrating...
He is a distinguished professor and I am not. I have been pressured throughout my career because I "do not publish enough". I know I am not alone, or even unusual.
It's a very widespread phenomenon. Perceptions about what is normal, typical and desireable are distorted by people who publish *a lot*. Those people are frequently rewarded for the volume of their output, rather than its quality...
... as in this case - the individual concerned is a "distinguished professor" and his output is no doubt is used as the yardstick against which others are judged.
... In this instance there's a good deal of textual overlap between papers, but the more general issue is that it's possible to have a very good career, and be promoted to a position of research leadership, by publishing a stream of closely-related papers...
... which do not individually add much to the sum of human knowledge. "Find a paradigm that works and crank the handle" to paraphrase advice I was once given...
... fortunately (?) I've been lucky to work with some brilliant scientists who took a very different view, and I have resisted the "crank the handle" approach.
... I feel that has allowed me to make more significant contributions in each paper, by e.g., developing new methods, modelling, bringing together insights from different topics, learning new skills, targeting harder and more interesting problems...
... maybe I am wrong, but in any event I am not able to influence how research is evaluated precisely because of my "low publication rate": I am not a "distinguished professor", and I don't get to influence how research is evaluated.
I think that an excessive publication rate is always a warning sign. Sometimes, it points to fraud, sometimes to laziness and self-plagiarism, sometimes to questionable research practices. And just occasionally to a truly brilliant and collaborative scientist.
It would not be difficult to run a scopus search to identify all the people who're publishing at an excessive rate. And I predict that they wouldn't all be the most brilliant and collaborative scientists, but I'm sure "distinguished professors" will be well represented.
I bet men will be massively over-represented, too.
It would be really interesting to see the distribution of annual publication rates. What is a typical or atypical rate at different career stages? The closest I got with a quick search is this recent paper looking at gender differences: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/9/4609
At first glance, I have some slight reservations, as this study reports mainly mean rates, whereas the distribution is likely skewed (& differently at different career stages) although there's an extensive and interesting appendix: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/02/17/1914221117.DCSupplemental/pnas.1914221117.sapp.pdf
The underlying data would be very interesting.
Anyway, caveats aside, it looks as if the average annual publication rate, over the active years of an entire career is (drumroll) ...
... Between 1 & 2 papers a year.
A log scale is needed to show the cumulative distribution (this is for all career years not just active years).
I am trying to get my head around this graph.
So, if I understand it correctly, the most productive (in terms of sheer volume) published scientists are shown on the left. As the inset shows, we have to go to the top 1% to see average annual publication rates greater than 5. Am I misreading this?
