Stop celebrating researchers with many publications

Researchers with >30 published research articles per year are seen as academic heros. But are they? I call on you to stop celebrating researchers with many publications.

With the beginning of a new year we like looking back at our achievements in the previous year. I do that as well and I am more than proud to report that we were able to teach more than 1000 people last year through the Digital Research Academy. At the same time, I am always wary of these simple key performance indicators (KPIs).

The number of publications is an often used KPI in researcher assessment for promotions, hiring, academic prizes or more. Yet does the quantity tell a relevant story of the quality or impact of our research? I don’t think so.

As always this post is citable and FAIR thanks to Rogue Scholar

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I always cringe when an academic speaker is introduced on stage with their incredibly high number of publications mentioned as a sign of their excellence. I just can’t believe that publishing more than 30 articles in one year can be achieved adhering to the common guidelines on authorship. Right?

Simple sketch of a researcher standing on a pile of papers.

Why do I think that? Let’s do the math for two different examples that can potentially generate many publications.

Let’s say we are talking about a professor, who supervises 5 PhD candidates and is involved in 5 collaborative projects. That would be already a pretty busy person. Now let’s say that each of the PhD candidates publish one paper per year and each of the collaborations produce one paper. The professor also publishes an article by themselves. What does that make? 11 papers. That is already quite a lot of output to genuinely contribute to. How can people reasonably belief that double or even tenfold of that is achievable without cutting corners?

Ok, for good measure let’s look a more extreme example. Let’s say there is a statistician who supports other researchers with their data analysis. This statistician is very good and every month supports two research projects which results in a publication. Counting holidays and conference visits, this would still be around 20 publications.

How could more than that be possible?
You may argue that some professors supervise more PhD candidates. To that I would say that this does not sound like proper supervision and cannot be done well unless there are other people (postdocs maybe) who support. I’ve heard more than once that supervising more than 5 people is difficult. Cambridge even saw the need to limit the number of research students. After all, with 20 PhD candidates, how much involvement does the professor still have in the paper? Is it still ok to request co-authorship?

The German research funder DFG states on their website:

The contribution must add to the research content of the publication. […] An identifiable, genuine contribution is deemed to exist particularly in instances in which a researcher – in a research-relevant way – takes part in

- the development and conceptual design of the research project, or

- the gathering, collection, acquisition or provision of data, software or sources, or

- the analysis/evaluation or interpretation of data, sources and conclusions drawn from them, or

- the drafting of the manuscript.

[…] Honorary authorship where no such contribution was made is not permissible. A leadership or supervisory function does not itself constitute co-authorship.

Aha!
A leadership or supervisory function does not itself constitute co-authorship!

Yes! Let’s stop abusing power and only claim co-authorship if we genuinely contribute to the research content of the publication! Genuine is an important word here.

I do recognize that there may be edge cases of people who do get many co-authorships within the authorship guidelines above. Let’s say someone collects data that subsequently is used in many studies (e.g. registry data). But then, what does the number tell us? Is it still a meaningful measure to compare across researchers? Probably no.

In the end, my conclusion is the same as my introduction: Stop celebrating researchers with many publications.

Let’s celebrate people or rather teams for their impactful work.
And I don’t mean impact as in impact factor. I mean impact on the world. Can that be measured in a single number? No! I think we need to learn to be ok with that.