Movement for a Free Academia—literature database
Movement for a Free Academia—literature database |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
Sandström, U., & van den Besselaar, P. (2016). Quantity and/or quality? The importance of publishing many papers. Plos One. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (16/05/2023, 11:52) |
 |
| Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed Published DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166149 BibTeX citation key: 2016 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: Bibliometrics Keywords: Research assessment Creators: van den Besselaar, Sandström Collection: Plos One |
Views: 1/200
|
| Abstract |
|
"Do highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers? Or do high productive researchers mainly produce a sea of irrelevant papers—in other words do we find a diminishing marginal result from productivity? The answer on these questions is important, as it may help to answer the question of whether the increased competition and increased use of indicators for research evaluation and accountability focus has perverse effects or not. We use a Swedish author disambiguated dataset consisting of 48.000 researchers and their WoS-publications during the period of 2008–2011 with citations until 2014 to investigate the relation between productivity and production of highly cited papers. As the analysis shows, quantity does make a difference."
|
| Notes |
|
Critiqued here (Price Persson 2017). Price Persson, C. (2017). “Slippery Slope” to place citations above quality in research. ScienceNordic, Retrieved May 16, 2023, from https://sciencenordic.c ... ity-in-research/1443197
|
| Musings |
|
One of their conclusions on p.12 of the PDF is that "the more papers, the more high impact papers. [... the] risk of confusing quality with quantity therefore lacks empirical support". However, this generalisation glosses over differences in fields. FIgure 2 on p.6 shows clear differences between the humanities (and computer science & mathematics) to other fields where the humanities exhibit what the researchers describe as "Small is beautiful: Publishing a lot is detrimental to quality. Those who write a lot may have even less top papers than those that are more selective" (p.3). Thus, what might also be concluded is that that sloppy conclusion does not hold true for all fields—working in the humanities, you are more likely to have top-cited publications if you publish less.
Nowhere is there any information on what constitutes various disciplionary fields. For example, what is 'humanities'? Surely there's an opportunity for research investigating whether the number of citations for a given publication is proportional to high quality of the publication. This proportionality appears to be a given. What if a citation disses the cited publication? And why is impact equated to or an understudy for quality? Hitler's ideas had enormous, world-changing impact, but were they of high quality? See also https://www.en.update.aau.dk/seven-aau-researchers-among-the-world-s-most-cited-n54583 for a university trumpeting high-citing publications
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
(16/05/2023, 17:36)
Keywords: Research assessment |