Abstract
The increase in the number of publications from past to present, leading to the present deluge of published papers. Argumentation that the average quality of a published paper has deteriorated significantly. Quantitative analysis of published science does not inform about the progress of science, i.e. the growth rate of scientific understanding of nature. The positive and negative workings of the internet. Fraud and deceit in scientific papers becoming more prominent in recent years. Top journals, eager to realize the speediest publication of a result thought to be startling and/or epoch-making, are prone to publication of immature and even fraudulent work. The high status of a Ph.D. degree is associated with the increase of recent cases of plagiarism in Ph.D. theses. Experiences as Editor of an international scientific journal. The limited significance and the abuse of a single number, as the “impact factor (IF)”, as a measure for the quality of a scientific journal and of a single number, as the “Hirsch (h) number”, as a measure for the quality of a scientist.
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Notes
- 1.
The UNESCO Science Report (2019) recounts that the number of scientists worldwide has attained a value of about 0.1% of the world population, i.e. corresponding to about 8 million.
- 2.
The number of scientists doubles about every 18 years, using the number of Ph.D. degrees granted as indication (W. Gastfriend at https://futureoflife.org/2015/11/05/90-of-all-the-scientists-that-ever-lived-are-alive-today/). The growth rate of science, in terms of quantitative output, may be expressed as the number of publications (as journal papers) appearing per unit of time. However, the existing data bases, as Web of Science (WoS), cover only a part of the published scientific literature, which part moreover decreases with time (P.O. Larsen and M. von Ins, Scientometrics, 84 (2010), 575–603). Therefore the number of cited references per unit of time can be considered as an alternative. An increase in the number of cited references reflects the increase of citing and/or cited papers. On this basis, considering publications from 1980 till 2012, the growth rate in the last 50 years is found to double about every 9 years; see Fig. 6.1 (source: L. Bornmann and R. Mutz, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66 (2015), 2215–2222).
It should be realized that in Fig. 6.1 the “growth” of science in the years before 1980 is mirrored by citing in papers from 1980 till 2012 (see above). Further, the flattening and then falling off observed in Fig. 6.1 for the years beyond 1980 is ascribed to increasingly fewer publications contained in the analysis (the part of all publications covered in the WoS decreases with time; see above). Moreover, those of the (especially newest/newer) publications which had not been cited yet are missed in the analysis. This last trend may even be more outspoken for publications in the field of materials science (see the comment about the “Cited Half-Life” under “Editor of a materials science journal” later in this chapter).
- 3.
Not only publishing the same result by the same author(s) in a somewhat different context is meant here (exception: the publication of a full paper after a short note has already appeared; a usually acceptable form of this phenomenon). Especially, not referencing of earlier work by other scientists, who obtained the same or very similar results, is grave scientific misconduct. In that case either one was unaware of the earlier work (likely caused by inadequate literature research, if performed at all) or one deliberately did not cite the predecessors and then this behaviour is damnable vanity. By chance I have witnessed myself a few times that (i) substantial text of a paper written by me and co-authors was even directly copied (without reference to our paper), and that (ii) results were presented which by themselves were all right but in fact involved full reproduction of our earlier work that was not referenced at all. An especially mean trick is that in the case (ii) one yet does refer to the original work by other authors, but at an irrelevant place in the paper that does not make clear that the major findings of the present paper had already been published before by these other authors. Numerous times I have observed this. Also see the intermezzo “Diffraction line profile analysis; the Voigt function and the “Dream Team”” in Chap. 10.
Of course, I am not the first to notice this negative trend associated with the current paper flooding. An entertaining booklet dealing with this topic has been published recently (G. Pacchioni, The Overproduction of Truth, Oxford University Press, 2018).
- 4.
As well as the “art” of letter writing. I regularly got emails from students, who hadn’t written the note/request if they had spent a little more thinking time before addressing me. Moreover, receiving such emails starting with the salutation “Hello”, from people who are not close to me, is bewildering. The handwritten or typed letters of the past had as distinct advantage that much more time, to contemplate what one wishes to bring forward, was involved before they were sent. This attitude would reduce a lot of the garbage sent via the internet.
- 5.
In recent years a series of Ph.D. theses, of especially but not only politicians in Germany and Austria, as members of parliament and ministers, were shown to be based to significant extent on plagiarism, causing deprivation of the Ph.D. degree. This grossly fraudulent behaviour attracted an enormous amount of public interest. This leaves undiscussed the lack of distinctly original, scientific quality of many Ph.D. theses, which, as it seems, particularly holds for dissertations in areas outside the natural (“hard”) sciences (unsurprisingly, the plagiarism by the politicians meant in this footnote concerned Ph.D. theses not in the field of the natural (“hard”) sciences).
- 6.
It is sometimes suggested to abandon the Ph.D. as an academic degree. The argument is that the quality of a scientist is judged on the basis of his/her published papers in the literature, not on his/her Ph.D. thesis which moreover often simply is a collection of such papers, published or (to be) submitted. However, this reasoning does not recognize that the completion and successful defense of a Ph.D. thesis, in the absence of negative developments as sketched in the main text above, represents an accomplishment indicating the ultimate completion of an academic education, comprising many years, also for those, sooner or later thereafter, no longer pursuing a career in science. In my view a societal sign of recognition, an academic degree, of this obtained level of competence is fully justified. Within this context, also see Chap. 13 under “Manners and Mores”.
- 7.
See: F.C. Fang and A. Casadevall, Editorial: “Retracted Science and the Retraction Index”, Infection and Immunity, (2011), 3855–3859.
- 8.
The referee does his/her task, voluntarily, unsalaried, in an honorary, anonymous capacity. Already therefore it is less appropriate in the first place to point an accusing finger at the referees: supposing a referee has no lack of time and is devoted to the evaluation of the manuscript to be reviewed, it may still be very difficult to impossible, without access to the raw data, to suspect, let alone identify, manipulation or data invention.
- 9.
This drive for priority for the journal differs from the drive for priority of the authors, as the latter priority is established by the date of submission of the manuscript to the journal, which is always printed in the published paper, usually at the beginning after the listing of the authors and their affiliations. Thus, in principle, the true originators will get all credits for being the first to have presented a specific scientific result, independent of the delay between the date of submission and the date of final publication of the paper. However, the historical record shows that such honesty is not always granted (by the scientific community); for such a case see “The Rietveld Method; an Improper and Dishonest Namesake” in Sect. 12.2, and see, in this context, also “Diffraction line profile analysis; the Voigt function and the “Dream Team”” in Chap. 10.
- 10.
For example, see: “The Economy of Fraud in Academic Publishing in China” by Mini Gu (April 3, 2018) at: https://wenr.wes.org/2018/04/the-economy-of-fraud-in-academic-publishing-in-china and “Scientific Fraud in China” by Steven Novella (November 27, 2019) at: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/scientific-fraud-in-china/. See also footnote 4 in Sect. 12.2.
- 11.
For example, see: “A shady market in scientific papers mars Iran’s rise in science” by Richard Stone (September 14, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah7297, at: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/shady-market-scientific-papers-mars-iran-s-rise-science.
- 12.
For example, see: H. Sabir, S. Kumbhare, A. Parate, R. Kumarand S. Das, “Scientific misconduct: a perspective from India”, Medicin, Health Care and Philosophy, 18 (2015), 177–184.
- 13.
In 1962 T.S. Kuhn published a book called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (The University of Chicago Press), that I read as a young student about a decade later. This book is a milestone, which has influenced the discussion of the history of science in a fundamental way. The book has been criticized, but the basic idea has been largely accepted.
- 14.
The story about the development and especially the difficult acceptance of Wegener’s theory is very well described in a book by A. Hallam: “A Revolution in the Earth Sciences, from Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics”, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973.
- 15.
Of course, science always corrects itself. Erroneous results do not survive. Sooner or later the true conclusions and data will prevail. But this can sometimes take a lot of time and a lot of additional work. In the meantime confusion and controversy can govern the debate. This obstructs the genuine progress of science. A lot is to be gained if errors by careless work by possibly moreover unqualified scientists can be avoided.
- 16.
Both the IF of a journal and the h-number of an author increase with time. This is caused by what can be called “citation inflation”: (i) the number of citations in a paper have increased in the passed 50 years; (ii) one citation counts as one for a journal but counts as one for each of the co-authors of a cited paper and the number of authors of a paper has increased considerably in the last decades; (iii) the total number of papers has increased over time (see earlier in this chapter). As a consequence, if one would assign critical values to the IF and the h-number for, respectively, indication of high quality for a journal and excellence for an author (if that would be possible at all; see criticism in the main text), then these “critical” values must increase with time (S. Cranford, Matter 2 (2020), 1343–1347).
- 17.
For an interesting consideration, see S. Senn at http://www.senns.demon.co.uk/Bibliometrics%20in%20Mathematics%20and%20Statistics%20V5.htm.
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Mittemeijer, E.J. (2022). “Publish or Perish”; The “Growth” and Progress of Science. In: How Science Runs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90095-3_6
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