Einstein warned that excessive pressure to publish papers “creates a danger of intellectual superficiality,” but the incentive structures in science still reward quantity over quality.
The discovery of the Higgs boson – one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements – might never have happened had Peter Higgs been more “productive” as a scientist. By today’s standards of scientific productivity, Higgs would be considered an underachiever, if he was regarded as a scientist at all.
“Today I wouldn’t get an academic job,” Higgs told The Guardian in 2013. “I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”
Higgs published fewer than 10 papers following his landmark 1964 publications that predicted a new particle to explain the origin of mass in elementary particles. This particle, discovered by CERN in 2012, earned Higgs the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with François Englert.
When Higgs retired from academia in 1996, he was troubled by the publish-or-perish mentality that requires scientists to “keep churning out papers,” adding that “it just wasn’t my way of doing things anymore.”
Given that the Higgs boson may have remained undiscovered if its namesake had been preoccupied with producing research papers of middling importance, one wonders what other breakthroughs are being missed by scientists whose job security depends on an ever-increasing volume of publications and citations.
Early-career pressures
Higgs was not alone in his assessment that quantity often trumps quality in scientific publishing, especially when early-career researchers feel pressured to chase metrics such as the h-index, which measures both productivity and citation impact.
In contrast, “older and tenured faculty… care less about the conventional metrics,” and tend to choose research topics and areas based on their own interests, “irrespective of whether this attracts a lot of citations,” writes Hendrik P. van Dalen in a 2020 paper. As a result, “they disconnect from what they perceive their peers might value.”
The pressure on young scientists to amass publications and citations encourages research that is relatively safe and incremental, rather than unconventional and potentially disruptive research that could take years to yield a published paper.
This is the point at which some journals focus on novice researchers, writes Samar M. Singh: “They tempt them with early and easy publication timelines with often concealed publication charges. Already searching for quick publications, the novice researcher falls prey to their fancy emails, which are often dotted with undue adulations.”
The dark side of prolific publishing
Journalist Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, says that predatory journals create a system that rewards those who churn out the most papers. “The fact is that publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals is about the only thing that matters to grant reviewers and tenure and promotion committees,” writes Oransky.
A consequence of this pressure to publish is a record-breaking number of retractions. More than 10,000 research papers were retracted from academic journals in 2023 alone, and roughly 20 journals have closed after being inundated by a barrage of fake research from so-called “paper mills” that churn out the scientific equivalent of clickbait.
Oranksy points out that the problem is exacerbated by journalists and media outlets that, under similar pressure to crank out content, sacrifice accuracy for clickability. “‘Publish or perish’ is essentially true for journalists," he writes. “When you have an editor breathing down your neck for the day’s – or in this day and age, the hour’s – story, you need to produce something quickly to earn those page views.”
A problem with deep roots
The origins of “publish or perish” (both the term and the mentality) are fuzzy, but seem to have emerged in the 1920s and taken root in the vernacular of academia in the ’30s and ’40s as scientific activity flourished. Robert W. Beard wrote in 1966 that the publish-or-perish mentality has “the pernicious feature of tending to trivialize scholarship” because it creates incentives for safe or unoriginal research.
Albert Einstein also saw the danger of publication pressure, commenting that “an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality.”
In addition, the publish-or-perish mindset spawns unsavoury conduct by those seeking to game the system, such as “salami slicing,” where a single research topic is divided into multiple papers to artificially boost readership and citations. Using such techniques, some hyper-prolific authors have published up to five articles a day, leading some journals to establish a “least publishable unit” – the smallest amount of science required to constitute a new paper.
Compounding the problem is the so-called reproducibility crisis – the growing inability of scientists to replicate the results achieved by their peers, which has long been considered a pivotal proof of a finding. Shoddy research methods, statistical issues, small sample sizes, simple typos, and unchecked bias can all hinder reproducibility and are often the result of a rushed path to publication.
A 2016 Nature survey of more than 1,500 researchers found that more than 70 percent had tried without success to reproduce another scientist’s result; more than half reported failing to reproduce at least one of their own experiments.
It doesn't have to be this way
The phrase “publish or perish” – like similar alliterative expressions such as “do or die” and “work or wither” – suggests a false dichotomy with only one good option. Since no ambitious academic wants to perish, the only apparent alternative is to crank out papers, sometimes forsaking exactness for expedience.
However, the publish-or-perish dichotomy need not be so stark. “Perishing” should not be the presumed consequence of not publishing. Over time, scientific publishing could redefine the metrics of success, emphasizing the impact of research over sheer volume, and reducing the pressure on early-career scientists to produce papers solely for career advancement and tenure. But the current incentive structures, tied as they are to job security for researchers and profits for pay-to-play journals, are resistant to change.
The Higgs boson was so well hidden in nature that it required deep theoretical investigation – and the world’s grandest experimental machine, the Large Hadron Collider – to find. The danger of the publish-or-perish survival strategy is that scientists may miss other hidden breakthroughs in favour of easier, career-building papers.
Carl Sagan wrote, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” It’s ironic that something incredible may remain unknown because too many scientists are publishing too many papers in too many journals.
