A blast from the past II: Academic publication pressure is hindering real research

Over a decade ago, I started a blog about my PhD journey. That blog is now discontinued, but I wrote some content for it that I think still stands the test of time and deserves to be revisited. The original text was written in Norwegian.

The text below was originally published on January 15th, 2015, and was about how academia actively hinders research and new knowledge with its overreliance on metrics of publishing as many articles as possible in the shortest possible time.

Look out for 💬 boxes where I add some present-day comments to the old text.

Academia is full of researchers who hide results, publish incomplete findings, and otherwise try to prevent other researchers from making progress on a common topic, so that no one can take their "honour and glory." By honour and glory, we mean published papers. Academia no longer cares about advancing science. What matters is producing the most papers in the most prestigious journals, nothing else. This stagnates scientific progress across the board. Something has to be done to remove publication pressure so that researchers can focus on acquiring new knowledge, and not on how to produce the most papers.

Published papers do not mean scientific progress

You would assume that published papers go hand in hand with scientific progress, but it is important to understand that papers are only a presentation of underlying research that may have been worked on for a very long time. The problem is that not all research can be presented immediately. Really good research can take years to carry out. Today's system punishes researchers for being thorough and taking their time. If it cannot be presented as soon as possible, it is not worth doing.

Afraid of giving away ideas

Another problem that follows from publication pressure is that some researchers will actively work to avoid giving other researchers ideas for future research. Over the last few months, I have been working on a paper with my supervisors. The simulations are done, the results have been analysed, and we are in the process of polishing the paper itself. During this process, we have had several meetings to discuss what should be presented in the paper and what should not.

A while back, I was in one of these meetings with my latest draft, which my supervisors then went through with me. There were a number of things that needed to be changed and improved, but there was one comment in particular I received that surprised me.

I ended my paper with a section on future research possibilities, where I listed a number of ways to continue the work we had started. I was asked to remove it entirely, because my supervisors felt I might be giving other researchers, our "competitors," ideas that would let them write papers before us. I then asked whether we had plans to do any of these things ourselves in the future. "No, we don't. But we don't want to give away good ideas."

To say I was shocked would be putting it mildly. But, it turns out that this attitude is shared by many in academia, and that an environment which should encourage sharing ideas instead prefers to hide ideas from one another.

A responsibility to share

A counterargument I have heard is that "if they're good enough, they'll figure it out themselves when they read our paper," which is far too narrow a view of the world. How many times have even the most talented among us had the thought "why didn't I think of that?" when someone else shared their view of a problem or their approach to a question?

Don't we as researchers have a desire, and a responsibility, to spread as much new knowledge as possible? Here I have clearly found a case where my view of research and that of my supervisors diverge strongly. How large are the dark numbers for other PhD candidates?

Publication pressure: an international problem

It cannot be denied that the focus of research has, in recent decades, shifted away from actually doing research toward publishing the most papers in the shortest time. We see this reflected increasingly in the fact that papers are getting shorter and more frequently lead to follow-up papers.

In an interview with The Guardian in December last year, Peter Higgs, the theorist who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, said: "I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system."

The fact that one of today's most influential researchers says himself that he simply would not be "good enough" for today's academia ought to set off alarm bells across international academia that something needs to be done.

A bygone era

The time when researchers could focus on research and on a genuine desire to understand how the world actually works is over. This is something that needs to change. If academia continues the way it is going, it will eventually swell with thousands of unread papers being published all the time. The constant chase to publish, if it hasn't already, will affect the quality of research, and will eventually reach a point low enough that the whole concept of academia might as well be scrapped.

I remember writing this piece. It was when I was really disillusioned by academia and considered quitting my PhD. I would love to say that my take back then was because I was jaded, and that reality was not so bleak as I portrayed it. But sadly, no, I was pretty spot on back then. Just a couple of months after writing this piece, a proper paper was published on the increasing Attention decay in science citing, "This is a consequence of the exponential growth in the number of scientific papers."

That was eleven years ago, and looking at the available data, the problem is even worse today. We can see that the global scientific output grew from around two million papers in 2010 to 3.3 million in 2022, a 65% increase in just over a decade. Not to mention retractions, when a published paper gets formally pulled from the scientific record because something was found to be wrong with it. In 2013, there were just over a thousand retractions. By 2022, that number had grown to around four thousand. Then came ChatGPT, and in 2023 fourteen thousand retraction notices were issued.

But what's worse, the academic system rewards the fraud! Despite being retracted, these papers managed to garner thousands of citations and millions in additional funding, long after their flaws were exposed. Authors got their publication credits. Universities got their ranking points. Publishers got their fees. The predatory journal lists thousands of such papers still not retracted, and the Retraction Watch keeps track of the biggest offenders.

Of recent retractions, an increasing number is attributed to AI-generated content, with notices citing "tortured phrases," "nonstandard phrases," and content "generated by a large language model." The 2024 paper "The Strain on Scientific Publishing" by Hanson et al. found that the number of scientific research papers is growing way too fast, with a 47% increase from 2016 to 2022. Orders of magnitude larger than the increase of number of scientists. This growth is only possible because certain publishers are intentionally churning out "special issues" with unusually fast review times to publish as much as possible.

This flood of new research is exhausting the scientists who volunteer to review the work, and it makes it much harder for everyone to figure out which journals and studies are actually high quality.

Safe to say: if academia was rotten before I left it a decade ago, it is even worse today.