In response to the article in The Chronicle on overproductivity in scientific research publication, a couple of e-mails have come in worth presenting at Brainstorm. Our thesis in the original article was that productivity demands in the sciences foster the publication of too much inferior or useless material and tax the peer-review system beyond its capacity to maintain quality control.
Soon after, Michael Skolnick sent a pdf file containing the article “Does Counting Publications Provide Any Useful Information about Academic Performance?” (published in Teacher Education Quarterly, Spring 2000). In it, Skolnick opens with an acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of item counting in hiring and tenure decisions:
“This practice is so pervasive that it extends even to the selection process for positions in which one would not expect publication counts to be a significant indicator of a person’s qualifications to do the job.”
Skolnick recalls serving on a hiring committee for an academic administrative position and receiving orders from professors that they should “reject any candidates whose Curriculum Vitae did not show a substantial list of publications.” Just count up pages and lines in italics and make a ranking—think of the advantages. It’s fast. You don’t have to read everything, just check out how much bulk there is and where it appeared (prestigious places?). Also, it’s objective. No fuzzy questions about quality and value.
After the experience, Skolnick has one conclusion:
“All things considered, there is really little justification for the importance which we attach to sheer counting of publications, and there are alternatives to reliance on it, one of which I suggested earlier—if we are serious about wanting to emphasize quality rather than quantity.”
Another response cites a more-recent study, a report from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley. It’s entitled “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” and authored by Diane Harley, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earli-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King.
It’s an important study, especially for the fields covered (archaeology, astrophysics, cell and molecular biology, economics, history). Among the findings and recommendations are “the development of more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics.” (This pertains to our consideration of citation metrics in the original article.) Several statements in the report are worth broadcasting, for instance that “some see the rising bar of tenure and promotion requirements [in history] as producing a ‘glut’ of low-quality books in American or modern history.”
In her e-mail to me, Professor Harley summarizes another conclusion, this one related to the hard sciences:
“Our work suggests that close reading of a scholar’s work in-house, and the rejection of R1 tenure and promotion requirements at 2nd and 3rd tier institutions, may be the only solution to the publishing arms race.” That may be difficult, however, she adds, as more and more universities in other nations emulate U.S. research universities and flood the academic world with more publications, “impos[ing] immense costs on the time faculty must take in peer review.”
(Illustration by Michael Glenwood from the original Commentary column)
