How Many Is Too Many? On the Relationship between Research Productivity and Impact.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27682366.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0162709 and PMC identifier 5040433.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Over the last few decades, the institutionalisation of quantitative research evaluations has created incentives for scholars to publish as many papers as possible. This paper assesses the effects of such incentives on individual researchers' scientific impact, by analysing the relationship between their number of articles and their proportion of highly cited papers. In other words, does the share of an author's top 1% most cited papers increase, remain stable, or decrease as his/her total number of papers increase? Using a large dataset of disambiguated researchers (N = 28,078,476) over the 1980-2013 period, this paper shows that, on average, the higher the number of papers a researcher publishes, the higher the proportion of these papers are amongst the most cited. This relationship is stronger for older cohorts of researchers, while decreasing returns to scale are observed for recent cohorts. On the whole, these results suggest that for established researchers, the strategy of publishing as many papers as possible did not yield lower shares of highly cited publications, but such a pattern is not always observed for younger scholars.