The pressure to publish pushes down quality

Scientists must publish less, says Daniel Sarewitz, or good research will be swamped by the ever-increasing volume of poor work. I am pleased to announce that as of the middle of April, my Elsevier publications had received 30,752 page views and 2,025 citations. I got these numbers in a promotional e-mail from Elsevier, and although I'm not sure what they mean, I presume that it would be even better to have even bigger numbers. Indeed, the widespread availability of bibliometric data from sources such as Elsevier, Google Scholar and Thomson Reuters ISI makes it easy for scientists (with their employers looking over their shoulders) to obsess about their productivity and impact, and to compare their numbers with those of other scientists. And if more is good, then the trends for science are favourable. The number of publications continues to grow exponentially; it was already approaching two million per year by 2012. More importantly , and contrary to common mythology, most papers do get cited. Indeed, more papers, from more journals, over longer periods of time, are being cited more often. One likely reason for rising citations is the incredible search capabilities that the web now affords. This would seem to be good news. But what if more is bad? In 1963, the physicist and historian of science Derek de Solla Price looked at growth trends in the research enterprise and saw the threat of " scientific doomsday ". The number of scientists and publications had been growing exponentially for 250 years, and Price realized that the trend was unsustain-able. Within a couple of generations, he said, it would lead to a world in which " we should have two scientists for every man, woman, child, and dog in the population ". Price was also an elit-ist who believed that quality could not be maintained amid such growth. He showed that scientific eminence was concentrated in a very small percentage of researchers, and that the number of leading scientists would therefore grow much more slowly than the number of merely good ones, and that would yield " an even greater preponderance of manpower able to write scientific papers, but not able to write distinguished ones ". The quality problem has reared its head in ways that Price could not have anticipated. Mainstream scientific leaders increasingly accept that large bodies of published research are unreliable. But what seems to have escaped general …