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A colleague sent me this today; it’s an interesting overview of what’s happened in other areas of science, as well as in the social sciences .. although I am not in agreement with their solution based on the use of impact factors and citation counts.
Trimble, S.W., Grody, W.W., McKelvey, B., & Gad-el-Hak, M. (2010). The glut of academic publishing: A call for a new culture. Academic Questions, 23, 3, 276-286.
It begins:
Academic publishing has already reached a point where too much material of too little substance is being published, and this trend is continuing. The ostensible reason for academic publishing is to communicate useful information to academic peers. But of all papers published in the top scientific journals (i.e., those listed in the citation index ISI Web of Knowledge)—7,279 science and social science journals from 2002 through 2006—only 40.6 percent were cited at least once in the five years following publication. More recent compilations with large databases indicate much the same proportions. Moreover, evidence suggests that social science papers are cited at a significantly lower level. And it should be noted that this includes self-citations: deleting these might lower the number considerably. In 1981, the total number of journals was 74,000 and by 1990 that number had risen to 108,500. By 2003, the total reached 172,000. Yet, we regularly see the creation of new journals in our fields every year. While we have no citation statistics for the large group of lesser journals, it would be a reasonable assumption that they are cited at a much lower level than the 40.6 percent indicated above. And we believe it might be reasonable to ask if some of these journals should continue, or at least be purchased by libraries.
From p. 281:
“A real contribution to a field often questions conventional wisdom, arguing that some well-established scholars may be in error. Such articles can be difficult to get past referees and editors. Juan Miguel Companario has reviewed many Nobel Prize laureates whose papers were rejected several times before being accepted. These examples range from Svante Arrhenius (1903) to Günter Blobel (1999), and the problem often obtains even for lesser mortals who submit ground-breaking papers.
Methods of producing many papers are well known. The most common is to include just enough contribution to be recognized as such in a single paper—just enough to be reluctantly accepted. These articles are sometimes referred to as “Least Publishable Units” (LPUs). Thus, multiple papers are required to deliver the full message. Rather than being challenged by the work, leaders in the field may in fact be patronized with citations and fawning comments to obtain their favor. The paper is then fleshed out to reach a respectable length. Sequential papers often contain much overlap, a device known as “shingling,” and are usually sent to different journals, sometimes simultaneously. The route to having many papers published can be a low road. ”
And from some excepts taken from the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Write-Badly-Succeed-Sciences/dp/1107676983 :
In the blog article by Timothy Taylor:
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.de/2014/03/how-academics-learn-to-write-badly.html
“In the late 1960s, only a minority of those working in American four-year higher educational colleges tended to publish regularly; today over sixty per cent do ... In 1969 only half of American academics in universities had published during the previous two years; by the late 1990s, the figure had risen to two-thirds, with even higher proportions in the research universities. The number of prolific publishers is increasing. In American universities the proportion of faculty, who had published five or more publications in the previous two years, exploded from a quarter in 1987 to nearly two-thirds by 1998, with the rise in the natural and social sciences particularly noticeable ...”
Boy, do we need field leadership and the courage to stand firm and reject outright the constant stream of low-impact and low-explanatory accuracy articles from both the famous and students alike. Let those who seek to publish such trivia suddenly find they are forced to publish in the latest pop-up Internet Journal which ironically will signify an article of no substantive interest.
What matters to me are substantive ideas (controversial or otherwise), lines of argument, and efforts to show why a result should be considered important (from a theoretical or practical perspective). And no spinning low effect sizes as something more than they indicate (low effect) - unless there is a really significant reason why that effect should be considered more than simple statistical dross.
Yep, now you see why it needs personal courage and a visionary sense of field-leadership. But it would also take courage and a hefty dose of computational ROI/longitudinal trajectory market-modeling from a journal publisher to back such an initiative.
But maybe it’s just me finding I’m being swamped with requests to review articles from many different journals that are of increasingly trivial substance? Anyone out there with their own impressions?
Regards .. Paul
Chief Research Scientist
Cognadev.com
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