We Must Stop The Avalanche of Low Quality Research

Via Derek Lowe. From the article:

Too much publication raises the refereeing load on leading practitioners—often beyond their capacity to cope. Recognized figures are besieged by journal and press editors who need authoritative judgments to take to their editorial boards. Foundations and government agencies need more and more people to serve on panels to review grant applications whose cumulative page counts keep rising. Departments need distinguished figures in a field to evaluate candidates for promotion whose research files have likewise swelled.

The productivity climate raises the demand on younger researchers. Once one graduate student in the sciences publishes three first-author papers before filing a dissertation, the bar rises for all the other graduate students.

The pace of publication accelerates, encouraging projects that don’t require extensive, time-consuming inquiry and evidence gathering. For example, instead of efficiently combining multiple results into one paper, professors often put all their students’ names on multiple papers, each of which contains part of the findings of just one of the students. One famous physicist has some 450 articles using such a strategy.