Erik Stokstad in Science (AAAS) writes: Publishing is one of the most ballyhooed metrics of scientific careers, and every researcher hates to have a gap in that part of his or her CV. Here’s some consolation: A new study finds that very few scientists—fewer than 1%—manage to publish a paper every year.
But these 150,608 scientists dominate the research journals, having their names on 41% of all papers. Among the most highly cited work, this elite group can be found among the co-authors of 87% of papers.
The new research, published on 9 July in PLOS ONE, was led by epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, with analysis of Elsevier’s Scopus database by colleagues Kevin Boyack and Richard Klavans at SciTech Strategies. They looked at papers published between 1996 and 2011 by 15 million scientists worldwide in many disciplines.
“I decided to study this question because I had seen in my life a large number of talented people who just did not survive in the current system and with the current limited resources,” Ioannidis wrote to ScienceInsider in an e-mail. He suspected that only a few scientists are able to publish papers year in, year out. But the finding that less than 1% do so surprised him, he says.
h/t to Dennis Wingo
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It seems to me that a similar rule holds true in climate science, with “big names” like Mann, Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, and others being on more papers than is the mean, but only an analysis will answer that question for certain.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0101698
The paper:
Estimates of the Continuously Publishing Core in the Scientific Workforce
Published: July 09, 2014 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0101698
Abstract
Background
The ability of a scientist to maintain a continuous stream of publication may be important, because research requires continuity of effort. However, there is no data on what proportion of scientists manages to publish each and every year over long periods of time.
Methodology/Principal Findings
Using the entire Scopus database, we estimated that there are 15,153,100 publishing scientists (distinct author identifiers) in the period 1996–2011. However, only 150,608 (<1%) of them have published something in each and every year in this 16-year period (uninterrupted, continuous presence [UCP] in the literature). This small core of scientists with UCP are far more cited than others, and they account for 41.7% of all papers in the same period and 87.1% of all papers with >1000 citations in the same period. Skipping even a single year substantially affected the average citation impact. We also studied the birth and death dynamics of membership in this influential UCP core, by imputing and estimating UCP-births and UCP-deaths. We estimated that 16,877 scientists would qualify for UCP-birth in 1997 (no publication in 1996, UCP in 1997–2012) and 9,673 scientists had their UCP-death in 2010. The relative representation of authors with UCP was enriched in Medical Research, in the academic sector and in Europe/North America, while the relative representation of authors without UCP was enriched in the Social Sciences and Humanities, in industry, and in other continents.
Conclusions
The proportion of the scientific workforce that maintains a continuous uninterrupted stream of publications each and every year over many years is very limited, but it accounts for the lion’s share of researchers with high citation impact. This finding may have implications for the structure, stability and vulnerability of the scientific workforce.
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How many papers did Einstein publish?
I’ll take quality over quantity, thank you.
“How many papers did Einstein publish?”
And how many were peer-reviewed?
I’m not that sure that ‘publishing’ is a guide to a scientist’s quality or usefulness.
I base this partly on experience, when I was at university, the ones who were keenest on publishing tended to be the ones that were the most out of touch with both students and society, the ones that treated students the worst and as just commodities for their dirty work, the ones that were the most inflexible, the ones that gamed the system, the ones that were the most dishonest, the ones that were the most socially unaware, the ones that never did any field work, whilst the others who didn’t publish just got on with the job teaching and instructing. These interacted with the students and treated them like human beings, whilst the publishing scientists tended to see students as simply as a resource to be exploited, students were only useful so far as they fit into their rigid research agendas. Personalities and lifestyles, regardless of the legality, had to make way for research requirements, rather than the other way around. Researchers could pick and chose which students they liked and which students fit their agenda, rather than allowing students to express themselves and determine their own futures. Some of the most prolific publishers didn’t even teach any courses, and used their higher status to get away with it.
There was most definitely a corrupting influence in the ‘publish or perish’ culture. This wasn’t the case amongst many who didn’t ‘publish’ at all.
Further to my comments above with has relevance to the above article on research statistics, university administrators have stated to me that part of the problem is that if you are going to have a publishing culture, there needs to also be adequate supervision of what researchers are up to, which isn’t always available. They themselves have sometimes complained about lack of resources to properly supervise what researchers were doing.
So you have the paradox here of scientist’s needs for funding and resources, and the reality that there needs to be adequate resources to ensure that researchers, and university research departments, need to also be adequately supervised, to ensure they conduct research in a proper manner. In other words someone needs to make sure that researchers follow the rules.
Wunderbar!, I’m in the top 1% finally, but where is my 1% income? Well, I don’t work in medicine or climate science, and I’m definitely not a rocket scientist, so bugger me.
Still, I do not find this surprising. I remember a study from long ago that the average PhD published less than 1 paper per lifetime. Some people are driven to do research and publish it and some aren’t. Some of the latter are happy enough to have convinced themselves of the validity of a particular hypothesis – one of my mentors was like that, he knew an incredible amount about his field, but only published when he was sure no one could rubbish him. I’m not a perfectionist and I do feel a debt to the tax payers who have funded my research, so I send out whatever I think will float in the hopes that someone else will find it useful. Besides, it’s too easy to convince yourself you are right – you need those jealous colleagues to keep you honest. Worked for me in terms of reputation, and there has been no falsification or regression to the mean (yet), but it has meant not having much of a real life outside or research and teaching. Well, better than a lifetime spent playing computer games (including models).
In my career I have found papers tend to be like buses. You can easily have a year with none then in the next year three come all at one. This is particularly the case with complicated research projects which take time to set up and do.
I also wonder how many of the 1% are the sort of academic leader that insists on their name being added to everything their team produces.
We are the 59%!
Agree with some commenters lie Tom G(oligist) above. Back when I was struggling with biochemistry and physiology, I remember doing a literature search on a particular metabolic pathway found in some marine organism. A husband and wife research team would publish five or six papers a year, by dint of publishing every time they had completed a fresh experiment – the results of prior experiments were regurgitated in each paper, with each experiment acting as a new variation, adding a tiny, or in some instances, nonexistent, increment of knowledge (“the results confirm our conclusions from earlier experiments etc.”) It was not bad science, but certainly was not earthshaking.
Historically, in earlier fisheries science, some individual scientists were remarkably prolific in terms of both quantity and variety of research. More recently, the big producers have a much narrower focus – but this must be said for those in environmental science.
It must be acknowledged that a lot of important work by scientists in environmental fields (eg fisheries, entyomology etc) ends up in grey literature (not published in science journals, but printed and circulated in-house) – serving as a database for other research. The material is important, but does not offer new theoretical insights and hence is not suitable for science publication.
mrjohnmcnab says:
July 16, 2014 at 3:05 am
In my career I have found papers tend to be like buses. You can easily have a year with none then in the next year three come all at one.
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I find elevators just as accommodating. About the same time frame too.
Sometimes this is simply due to a negotiation over ‘usage rights’.
There are some biologists who made a set of monoclonal antibodies and every paper using them coming out of that lab for the next 15 years has their name on it, even though they left the lab 10 years previously. I am strongly opposed to this, because it pumps up certain people’s ‘productivity’ when they didn’t actually do any of the work. Fine for 2 or 3 years after they leave the lab, but no more. At that point, the reagent is in general use and nothing new has been added.
You find similar situations when a lab head shares reagents with other labs – of course, the first few papers should acknowledge the work of creating the reagents, but how long for??
More discerning people have two lists: first authorship + senior authorship (i.e. last); and all the rest. If you are first, it probably means you did a majority of the work. If you are last, you are probably the lab head who raised the funds, supervised the work etc. In between, who knows what you did…..
A lab head who can’t publish every year either doesn’t have a very big lab or they do very, very speculative research. If you have 3 PhD students and two postdocs, you’d expect to have at least 2 – 3 papers a year of original research and you might well be authoring a review article, a technical monograph not to mention editing a book.
For a PhD student or a postdoc, the key is to ‘fit into an experimental system that is already up and running’. If the lab already has this slick, you can easily get enough data in 6 months to publish. If you have to develop something from scratch, it might take you 18 months before results start coming. Rarely is that spade work acknowledged by employers.
Let’s ask this: if you saw Fred Sanger’s publication record over 40 years, he published under 10 papers. Pretty pathetic eh??
Well, not really. He invented the method of sequencing the amino acid composition for proteins, which won him a Nobel Prize. He invented the method of using dideoxy sequencing of DNA, which underpins the entire genetics revolution. That won him a second Nobel. He always invented a method for sequencing RNA, which didn’t win him a third Nobel, probably because there’s not really a major application for sequencing RNA. He was also at the forefront of sequencing entire genomes for small bacteriophages, which was, in its day, as big an achievement as the automated sequencing of a plant genome today.
It takes insight to judge what publication records really mean. If you want ‘dull but worthy’, look for lots of papers which didn’t change fields, but added knowledge. If you want ‘genius’, you may need to back them for 6 or 7 years without publishing anything, then you might make £100m as an institution on the back of a groundbreaking set of patents, which then get published academically once protection is secure. Of course, you might end up with nothing too. Don’t risk it if you can’t stand the possibility of failure…….
DD More says:
July 15, 2014 at 10:17 am
The new research, published on 9 July in PLOS ONE, was led by epidemiologist John Ioannidis
,,,
So it took someone who looks at a spreading disease in a specific group to check find what the results looked like
He has a lot more going on and for him than that. He has spearheaded a challenge to medical publishing that is literally world-shaking. Try this 2010 article, first: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/