The incentives in scientific publishing are even more perverse than I assumed.
Recently I talked to someone who is an editor in a small scientific journal. They said that the work feels meaningful to them, because they get a few good scientific articles that probably couldn’t get published elsewhere (they are good, but not so important in the large picture). Then they complained about also getting lots of articles that suck (such as: fail to consider obvious alternative explanations, or the conclusions in the text contradict the attached data), mostly from various African and Chinese wannabe scientists.
“So you publish the good articles, and reject the bad ones, right?” I asked.
“I wish I could”, they said. The problem is that although the journal currently has quite low impact factor, rejecting the bad articles would lower it. How is that possible? The scientific journals are expect to publish a certain minimum number of articles per year, and they are penalized if they fail to meet the quota.
And this is why the editor sometimes accepts articles that obviously suck, because rejecting them would reduce the rating of the good articles published in the journal.
The extreme version of this would be a journal that only contains one, very popular, paper.
Sounds weird, but what is the harm actually? We assume that the paper is good. How could the journal abuse the situation? If they start publishing bad papers afterwards, they will ruin the average.
I guess it’s annoying to have several such journals at the top of rankings lists. Similarly to how if you look up a list of premier league footballers with the highest goals per game, the list will normally be restricted to players who’ve played a certain number of games.
Possible, but then I am curious about the details. I think that a well-designed system should resist even creating a separate journal for each article. I mean, those articles/journals still need to get citations from outside, that is the difficult part.
Is there something like “a citation from a different journal is worth more than a citation from the same journal” which would encourage making each article a separate journal so that each citation has a maximum value? I think this can still be gamed by making two or three parallel journals, and placing each article to the opposite of the cited articles.
The incentives in scientific publishing are even more perverse than I assumed.
Recently I talked to someone who is an editor in a small scientific journal. They said that the work feels meaningful to them, because they get a few good scientific articles that probably couldn’t get published elsewhere (they are good, but not so important in the large picture). Then they complained about also getting lots of articles that suck (such as: fail to consider obvious alternative explanations, or the conclusions in the text contradict the attached data), mostly from various African and Chinese wannabe scientists.
“So you publish the good articles, and reject the bad ones, right?” I asked.
“I wish I could”, they said. The problem is that although the journal currently has quite low impact factor, rejecting the bad articles would lower it. How is that possible? The scientific journals are expect to publish a certain minimum number of articles per year, and they are penalized if they fail to meet the quota.
And this is why the editor sometimes accepts articles that obviously suck, because rejecting them would reduce the rating of the good articles published in the journal.
I assume the minimum number was put into place in order to prevent another method of gaming the system.
Impact factor is some average citation count, so without a minimum you could game it by waiting for one big hit paper.
The extreme version of this would be a journal that only contains one, very popular, paper.
Sounds weird, but what is the harm actually? We assume that the paper is good. How could the journal abuse the situation? If they start publishing bad papers afterwards, they will ruin the average.
I guess it’s annoying to have several such journals at the top of rankings lists. Similarly to how if you look up a list of premier league footballers with the highest goals per game, the list will normally be restricted to players who’ve played a certain number of games.
Possible, but then I am curious about the details. I think that a well-designed system should resist even creating a separate journal for each article. I mean, those articles/journals still need to get citations from outside, that is the difficult part.
Is there something like “a citation from a different journal is worth more than a citation from the same journal” which would encourage making each article a separate journal so that each citation has a maximum value? I think this can still be gamed by making two or three parallel journals, and placing each article to the opposite of the cited articles.