I greatly enjoyed Mohamed Gadel-Hak’s Opinion piece “Publish or Perish—An Ailing Enterprise?” (Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 57 3 2004 61 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1712503 March 2004, page 61 ). A physicist by undergraduate training, I am now doing auditory research in psychology. It is my sad duty to report that the proliferation of publishing mediocrity that Gadel-Hak describes with such clarity is hardly limited to the physical sciences. Unfortunately, psychology is dominated by the current political correctness, so if anyone is to lead us out of this publishing wasteland, it will not be a psychologist. It is good, therefore, that a physical scientist has the courage to say what needs to be said. I have openly expressed my own discontent with some aspects of the current scientific system 1 but my comments fell on deaf ears.
Gad-el-Hak’s briefly worded solution to the problems of evaluating both journals and individual authors is a familiar one: impact factors, judged by citation rate. He immediately acknowledges, however, that sheer numbers of citations may not be a fair “index of competence,” as he puts it, for younger scientists; he suggests the number of citations per publication as an alternative. That, too, has its problems.
Impact, though, has nothing to do with competence. Rating the impact of a journal is a different task from rating the competence of an individual. The effects of the competence or incompetence of individual papers average out to produce a greater or lesser reputation for a given journal. As the journal matures, its reputation stabilizes, and can even improve.
The impact of a young scientist is not a sensible concept, especially given that “young” refers to something completely different from what it did, say, 30 years ago. 2 In 1970, for example, the average age at PhD matriculation in this country might have been 26. Today, it is much likely closer to 35. Granted, some precocious individuals have had an unmistakable impact by obtaining numerous citations at a comparatively young age. But for the majority of younger scientists, citation count is not a mark of competence.
Citations can be given in a prejudicial fashion. For example, there are tales of citation cartels in which people, research groups, or even institutions agree to favor each other’s work. I believe I know of several in my field. A lack of citation can also be due to personal acrimony. Furthermore, some work is not acknowledged simply to avoid bolstering the author’s citation count!
These factors, combined with the sheer volume of published work, can prevent even first-rate work from being noticed. In such an atmosphere, only written evaluations by those who have read the candidate’s work can be taken as formal indicators of competence. But this approach runs head-on against another problem identified by Gad-el-Hak: profligate coauthorship. Exactly whose work is to be evaluated? Someone can easily be a coauthor of a well-cited paper to which he or she has contributed little insight. How do we know for sure whose impact is being factored?
Gad-el-Hak has done us all a favor by so eloquently pointing out what has happened to academic publishing under the impact of publish-or-perish.
