Pressures to Publish: What Effects Do We See?

Abstract

Concerns for the negative effects of pressures to publish date back at least to the 1950s (Siegel and Baveye, 2010; see also Alex Csiszar in this volume, chapter 1) and today are more widespread than ever. There is virtually no contemporary article that, in analyzing or commenting on issues of research integrity, will fail to suggest that scientists might be increasingly engaging in problematic research practices. At the very least, it is typically argued that scientists may be cynically "salami-slicing" their results (i.e., fractioning them to maximize publication output), but multiple other detrimental practices, right up to the most egregious scientific crime of data fabrication, are suggested to represent plausible strategies to "game" a system that imposes increasingly unreasonable productivity expectations (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017). Such "pressures to publish" might be imposed upon scientists explicitly by their employing institutions but also implicitly, through the institutional use of faulty metrics of publication quantity and quality (figure 8.1).This narrative is logically consistent and plausible, but is it correct? The empirical evidence that is most typically invoked in support of the pressures to publish hypothesis comes from anonymous surveys and qualitative studies that observed a connection between reported pressures to publish and likelihood to observe or indulge in questionable behaviors (

Why we should all be reflexive: The case for reflexivity in quantitative science

“…Reflexivity demands time and effort, resources that could otherwise be spent on producing more papers. Researchers competing for academic positions find themselves under immense pressure to publish as many articles as possible because they are measured against this yardstick (77). In contrast to this, reflexivity is more aligned with slow science that cherishes quality over quantity (78).…”

Scholarly Publishing, Boundary Processes, and the Problem of Fake Peer Reviews

“…While they are a threat to the distinction between legitimate/illegitimate publishers, they (or, more specifically, efforts to combat them through retractions) reaffirm the lines between publishers, providing an opportunity for commercial providers to performatively assert their commitment to ethics and scholarly integrity. Notably, high impact journals have been the most proactive adopters of retraction policies, and the number of journals following suit has dramatically increased in recent years (Fanelli 2020). Thus, retractions for fake reviews or other reasons are a perceived signal of journal quality.…”