Has anyone else noticed how a great many problems in academia and academic publishing today are due to the use of publications as a measure of research productivity? A thread:
Using journal "prestige" (or IF) to assess research quality, rather than the attributes of the research itself, increases their value of established journals and publishers. This leads to those journals playing a gatekeeping role rather than a true peer-review role.
In order to retain their high prestige, the gatekeeping journals must prioritize the publication of exciting novel results. This disincentivizes the publication of replications, null results, and work that isn't deemed "ground-breaking".
This focus on novelty also serves to indirectly encourage p-hacking and shoddy methods in an attempt to get a "publishable" result. This deepens the replication crisis.
Further, generally valuing quantity over quality leads to researchers being incentivized to "salami-slice" and use "minimal publishable units" to try to get as many papers as possible out of a project. This further increases demand for publication space in journals.
This increase in demand for space leaves an empty niche in the market, which predatory publishers are happy to fill. They serve no purpose other than to let authors say "I published X articles this year", meeting their institutional requirements. Write-only journals.
The reliance of academics on publishing effectively hands a lot of power to large for-profit publishing houses. These companies have raised their prices, now putting financial strain on academic library systems.
So, the policy of measuring research productivity via publications has led to: a deepening of the replication crisis; the rise of predatory publishers; ballooning costs of higher education.
(To be sure, there are other factors that also caused those results, but we cannot deny that our methods of assessing research productivity (and incentivizing publication) have played a role.)
The whole thing is a neat illustration of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." In this case, the pursuit of publication for publication's sake has lead to profound disturbances in how science is carried out.
Maybe it's time to rethink what a "productive scholar" is? /fin
