The Scientometric Bubble Considered Harmful

Abstract

This article deals with a modern disease of academic science that consists of an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge. Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers. If we consider academic papers as a kind of scientific 'currency' that is backed by gold bullion in the central bank of 'true' science, then we are witnessing an article-inflation phenomenon, a scientometric bubble that is most harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers. The main problem behind the scenes is that the impact factor is used as a proxy for quality. Therefore, not only for convenience, but also based on ethical principles of scientific research, we adhere to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment when it emphasizes "the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in funding, appointment and promotion considerations; and the need to assess research on its own merits rather on the journal in which the research is published". Our message is mainly addressed to the funding agencies and universities that award tenures or grants and manage research programmes, especially in developing countries. The message is also addressed to well-established scientists who have the power to change things when they participate in committees for grants and jobs.

Congenital diaphragmatic hernia: a scientometric analysis of the global research activity and collaborative networks

“…Besides a growing scientific interest in CDH worldwide, this development may reflect the rapidly increasing volume of biomedical articles in general and increasing pressure for clinicians and scientists to publish, also known as the "publish or perish" climate [23]. Unfortunately, modern academia has created an artificial necessity of publishing, not for the advance of knowledge, but for the advance of professional careers [24]. Furthermore, our analysis of subject categories and scientific journals showed an increasing diversification into medical subspecialties and newer research areas, which also applies for the professional fields that CDH authors currently work in.…”

The Brazilian scientific output published in journals: A study based on a large CV database

“…As a result, a journal's expected impact and quantity of papers become positively correlated (Huang, 2016). However, easily quantifiable measures of publication quality-such as number of citations and quantity of published papers in journals of high impact-have been increasingly questioned (Seglen, 1997;Frey and Rosa, 2010;Beets et al, 2016;Genova et al, 2016). It is argued that quality should be assessed by the value of new insights accrued from a published paper and, thus, additional qualitative measures are urged to be used along the conventional measures above.…”

Hip-Hop librarianship for scholarly communication: An approach to introducing topics

“…As one journal management system blogged, having "search-engine friendly content is obviously of paramount importance to online-only journals as, aside from word of mouth, searches will be the primary way that scholars unfamiliar with your journal learn about it" (Scholastica, 2018). In their article, titled "The Scientometric Bubble Considered Harmful", the authors wonder: "how many readers may have been attracted to start reading this article by our marketingwise title" (Génova, Astudillo, & Fraga, 2016). When higher readership is shown to lead to higher citation rates, then it only makes sense to craft article titles with characteristics common to journal articles with very high-rates of online sharing such as "result-oriented positive framing" and "no wordplay" (Lockwood, 2016).…”