Over the last decade, a debate has been emerging on “Academia’s obsession with quantity” (Lawrence 2007; Fischer et al. 2012a) and the subsequent Impact Factor Race, an unhealthy game played by scientists (Cherubini 2008; Brischoux and Cook 2009). Despite being widely despised by the scientific community (but see Loyola et al. 2012), the “publish or perish” dogma and the use of productivity indices (e.g., journal’s impact factor, number of published articles) to assess a researcher’s output seem to hold on, as suggested by the relatively frequent publications on this subject (e.g., Lawrence 2007; McDade et al. 2011; Fischer et al. 2012a; Kaushal and Jeschke 2014; Jacobs 2014 see also Carpenter et al. 2014).
Yet, actual quantification of the effects of this deviance on the politics of scientific research remains complicated. For instance, this obsession with quantity is expected to produce tougher competition for positions in an already uncertain job market (Sanchis-Gomar 2014) and,...
Keywords
Impact Factor Career Duration Young Researcher Research Position SalamiNotes
Acknowledgments
We thank the CNRS and Morgan Reynaud for providing the list of young recruits, and Lucy Runacre for improving the English.
References
- Aitkenhead, D. (2013). Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system.
- Brischoux, F., & Cook, T. R. (2009). Juniors seek an end to the impact factor race. BioScience, 59, 638–639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Carpenter, C. R., Cone, D. C., & Sarli, C. C. (2014). Using publication metrics to highlight academic productivity and research impact. Academic Emergency Medicine, 21, 1160–1172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Cherubini, P. (2008). Impact factor fever. Science, 322, 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- DORA. (2013). http://www.ascb.org/dora-old/files/SFDeclarationFINAL.pdf.
- Fischer, J., Ritchie, E. G., & Hanspach, J. (2012a). Academia’s obsession with quantity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27, 473–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Fischer, J., Ritchie, E. G., Hanspach, J., et al. (2012b). An academia beyond quantity: A reply to Loyola et al. and Halme et al. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27, 587–588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Jackson, D., Walter, G., Daly, J., & Cleary, M. (2013). Multiple outputs from single studies: Acceptable division of findings vs. ‘salami’ slicing. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 23, 1–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Jacobs, H. (2013). Dear DORA. EMBO Reports, 14, 947.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Jacobs, H. (2014). Something rotten. EMBO Reports, 15, 817.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Kaushal, S. S., & Jeschke, J. M. (2014). Collegiality versus competition: How metrics shape scientific communities. BioScience, 63, 155–156.Google Scholar
- Lawrence, P. A. (2007). The mismeasurment of science. Current Biology, 17, R583–R585.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Loyola, R. D., Diniz-Filho, J. A. F., & Bini, L. M. (2012). Obsession with quantity: A view from the south. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27, 585.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- McDade, L. A., Maddison, D. R., Guralnick, R., Piwowar, H. A., Jameson, M. L., Helgen, K. M., et al. (2011). Biology needs a modern assessment system for professional productivity. BioScience, 61, 619–625.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Nabout, J. C., Parreira, M. R., Teresa, F. B., Carneiro, F. M., da Cunha, H. F., de Souza Ondei, L., et al. (2015). Publish (in a group) or perish (alone): The trend from single- to multi-authorship in biological papers. Scientometrics, 102, 357–364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Sanchis-Gomar, F. (2014). How does the journal impact factor affect the CV of PhD students? EMBO Reports, 15, 207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar