What can be done to stop this trend? We don't need more papers per author per year - we rather need less, and more complete papers that actually discuss an important problem.

Because the institution asked the researchers of continuous achievements

I agree that it is not a good idea to try to publish research that is only partly ready and thereby miss the opportunity to publish something interesting, worthwhile and citable for other researchers and/or useful for practitioners.

It is also understandable that this happens, from the individuals perspective, especially if he/she needs one more publication to move on in life or even be able to continue at a university (even if nobody needs the content of the publication). Some seems so stressed for career that this is the situation permanently.

But we must remember that science in the bigger perspective is about enhancement of knowledge and questions, not primarily about people’s carreer’s or the ranking of universities.

However, I think there is a system failure involved as well. When / if a very good manuscript, with sound data, method, analysis, exciting results and conclusion has been completed and submitted, it is reasonably very frustrating to have to wait years, while it becomes older. There could be a system with initial publication of a draft, that could be discussed openly , be enhanced and then acquire a status. Something similar with how good wikipedia articles are created ( no other comparisons intended). ”Publication” in the basic sense, making something available, is no longer a problem - alla of us can publish whatever crap at once. The problem is how the status and ranking of what is being published comes to be.

See also an earlier discussion here in RG about if too much research is being published. https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_too_much_academic_research_being_published_today

One bug - it seems to me - is that there is an ever increasing number of journals started, utilizing the mere fact that the number of "scientists" is growing, and therefore those new "scientists" have a need to find an outlet. You can sometimes tell that from the title ... I have looked at some of those journals - no names mentioned here - and plenty of it is a complete disgrace.

Hi,

The need to publish science papers in a hurry emanates from the requirements of institutional promotions. There is a certain number of paper published that one has to present when being in a promotional process. This has become a race in which quantity is more important than quality.

What can be done to stop this trend? We don't need more papers per author per year - we rather need less, and more complete papers that actually discuss an important problem.

Generally, the number of publications is considered a rough measure of the productivity of a researcher. It is pretty obvious that there are more important criteria, like the quality of the publications, albeit this is not easy to measure. (Gauss' number of publications is nowhere close to that of Euler, still he might be considered the greatest mathematician of all times because of the quality/impact of his publications.) Even if a paper is published in a high impact journal, this does not mean that the paper is of high quality. Also, to my experience, quite a number of excellent papers were published in low impact journals. I am not aware of a more efficient system for measuring the productivity of researchers.

Of course if you just count the number of papers, all looks quite well. The main reason why we do not assess carefully what we actually write and how important/useful it is, is because it is a very complex task. Since no-one wants to take on that task - although it would be a VERY good idea to do so - we will keep bombing the science universe with papers that do not actually solve any problem, do not analyze anything deeply enough, and simply are written because your boss says so, or your grant holder says so. I remember a conversation way back, when we came to the conclusion that a rather large portion of us are in academia in order to make the unemployment figures low. :-)

Michael Patriksson I do agree with your point. By the way, it is also true that a new investigator is heavily pressured to publish more articles in a high impact factor journal than the others, which increases the possibility of getting a faculty position or being promoted. And I have also been doing my best to present a feasible, viable solution to the research problem; however, the mainstream research group covertly interrupts my articles to be published. Since I have intensively criticized their massive "association" studies that cannot produce an actual solution to the problem, I understand such a side effect to some extent; however, I sometimes lose will to study further.

People could be making their own selection of papers to refer to in order to illustrate a point that is refined and complex.

If I were in control of my Bachelor of Engineering Honours Thesis, it would've been the size of a PhD and brought undergraduates up to speed with the frontier of research. Something undergraduates can read while their course material takes a week to produce an hour of content. If I had that kind of room to refer to science I could have opened the floor for some bigger topics. With just an honours I could barely talk about "how to predict the future of AI with AI", "taking the limit of the prediction of future AI", "Information: best kept secret" and modelling secret services based on the core foundation that the existence of information by default does not necessitate that the information is good, which is the necessary precondition to discussing said information given that "good information" is defined as being both "safe to talk about" and "worthwhile to talk about".

All I could do was just one AI, one prediction, and barely even then could I get the researcher up to speed on what I was doing, because they hadn't studied the relationship between Economics and Reproductive Biology, because that wasn't written either, because I couldn't fit the references in.

Why do Professors have an aversion to teaching?

Calling it a rush to publish is the mis-characterisation of someone who has an aversion to publishing. I see articles with contributors that go on for miles and I know most of them did no work, and most of the professors took no advice neither.

There's no platform for recursive references. No platform for scientific databasing standardization on standardizeable experimental procedures. No conception of standardizeable experimental procedure other than a Chemical analysis or a wiki planet entry. Experiments aren't batch-plans to go on for 100 years, it's one grant, this year, and always mostly someone else's project.

People could be writing 2000 words a day on their firsthand reports, all knowledge about knowledge could streamline the data entry point to the data holding point, all needed experiments could be allocated to the next people in the inheritance of knowledge chain, people could rotate through disciplines on a free-education system, and class projects could be mutually profitable.

Professors have a rush to arrogance when the student is fresh out of the bag and can't be heard. Which leads them to want to have 20 or 200 or so papers so they can say "look, if you have something to say, catch up to me first," because most of them, if teachers were ever any good, probably have learnt a thing or two by now.

I'm worried when it takes my senior 4 years to do a project that I could've done on my iPhone on a single day, all because he was paid to take his time, and I'm in a rush to get my degree. But I chose not to do his work, because professors are being dicks about it, getting paid AND shafting the student (trick is, we pay them to shaft the student, that's how we convinced them it was an okay thing to do, and we proved they could be tricked first, QED or what?).

I can publish my stuff right here the moment I come up with it and there's not a thing you can do about it.

There is infinitely infinite knowledge. That's ungraspably large.

The quickest road to "more complete papers" is through increasing "papers per author". How is that reality such a problem to work out for you? If not, the road there and the road here are the same. Are you struggling to find more work?

Each paper of a certain type should open up the discussion for 10+ new papers. Each paper of another certain type should close the discussion for 10+ papers. The window of opening should remain larger. Just because we are here stuck on simpleton street and still can't manage to list all our assumptions (necessarily so with the lack of recursive referencing), and most of the work of most of our best people have mostly gone by un-read (I'm referring to Alchemy by Newton, hard to find when I lose my bookmark) and un-referred to. Is that because he was ending the discussion for others from before, or what he said has yet to start? Chemical reactions databases might have to be scoured for it to make sense, or, heaven's forbid, might've changed since then (rightfully doubted, but still an assumption, not a thing we do anywhere but in Fluid Dynamics). The trick to a shear-total re-arranging complexity would end the conversation on all previous topics and hold the conversation for all knew topics, an impossible move considering things work so well. Are you frustrated over the facts being mundane, or not what you wanted, or are you looking for a new way to express yourself with each paper becoming thicker, or easier to produce? Isn't that a limit on scientism? How scientific a scientist is over the time they perform science, how to increase the ease to excel at science? That's a competition metric and I think you come out on top. Relative to the network of scientists, but something they try to use a bell-curve for.

Its a rat race -- to get promotion early --Alas ! we are loosing quality

I do find that the idea of writing many papers just because you can is very bad, and I have tons of experience of it - my own as well as colleagues and scientists whose work I have assessed. My conclusion is that for your own good, do not write five incomplete papers - instead write two complete and excellent ones.

Why? (a) Five years on you will still be proud of those two papers. (b) If you shell out five-six papers instead of those two, you will at first feel good, but a few years ahead you will be sorry that you couldn't write even one complete and very, very good paper at all. Those excellent papers will become the ones that you will remember, even 50 years from now, and those will perhaps also be your most cited ones.

Michael Patriksson , are you saying my one of slight is not good enough for you? If someone were to make a ground breaking discovery on the back of a napkin, I think it can still be referred to.

For students, publications may be requirements for graduation (which is not cool).

Aden Handasyde It's not possible to publish a napkin! :-) It needs to be developed into a real paper, and to be assessed by reviewers in order to finally be published in a good journal, preferably in one where you do not immediately need to pay anything. This is how it has been done for many years, and I do not see any other way to do it.

We are human and we have this basic intention of being praised and admired. this is no problem when we are all trying publish papers to coin our names in the history, the problem lies somewhere else: each scientific paper should have two aspects, content and form. The real problem is when these two are not well adjusted or a paper lacks one or two of them.

Generally speaking, this problem will be solved through the time, low quality papers won't be cited and indirectly filtered out.

Hence, I think this rush of writing papers won't be important, because a gold is gold even in the mud!

Maybe researchers have to justify their 1-course, or fewer, teaching loads while their colleagues have 4+.