Publish or perish
Buried in a New York Times article on the problems with scientific journals letting fraudulent research slip through was this comment:
The journals’ own peer review processes, which are intended to be the first barrier against fraud, have come under criticism lately. A cover story in the February issue of The Scientist said that the top-tier journals were receiving more submissions every year, overtaxing peer reviewers and weakening the screening process.
The real problem with academic publishing isn’t the occasional fraudulent study but the routine publication of too many articles serving no useful purpose. I would be surprised if the increase in submissions noted by The Scientist reflects a meaningful increase in quality. Maybe editors and peer reviewers would have more time to pay attention to submitted manuscripts if there weren’t so many that are motivated more by the need to get a job or tenure than by confidence the research is worth doing and the results are worth publishing.
I first complained about this academic pressure to publish in 1983 when I saw professors urging undergraduates to publish in order to get into graduate school. Publishing has become an end in itself, a sign of legitimacy. There’s so much published in so many journals, so many trivial variations of the same themes, that reviewers can’t possibly put in enough time to sort it all out. The publish-or-perish assembly line may benefit the authors and reviewers and editors, but it’s hard to say that so many articles destined to be read by almost no one are the best system we could devise.
As I noted in my 1983 piece and in a follow-up, the pressure to publish extends well beyond psychology and even beyond the sciences. There’s a small literature on this issue (with publications!) advocating alternatives, such as a proposal (I think by psychologist Paul Wachtel, among others) that hiring committees look at no more than an applicant’s three best articles instead of a list of dozens. That might encourage careful investigation and reporting rather than mass production.
Hasn’t happened yet, though.