<p>"...While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, P</p>
<p>Pretty much what I hear most of us saying daily in the lab. The majority of papers in my field are total junk. I’ve read a ton of papers whose work likely didn’t take more than an afternoon to perform, since instead of doing the research the proper way, the groups will instead find a “quick and dirty” solution so they can simply be the first to publish. </p>
<p>I’ll also be quite willing to say there’s a disproportionate number of these papers coming from China. Heck, I remember seeing a series of papers where they quite literally cut and pasted whole sections of their paper from one to the next. They were performing the same experiment on slightly different systems every year. It was, generally, one or two experiments which would only take a day at most. It almost felt like one person did all the measurements in a month and then decided to slowly let them trickle out over the next few years.</p>
<p>I didn’t read in depth, but did they really look at the top 4,500 journals? If so, I’m actually surprised that >40% of all articles are cited within five years. For me, there are around 10-15 journals that I check every issue, ranging from cognitive psychology to cellular neuroscience. I sporadically search for specific topics or authors and so occasionally read other journals, too. That still leaves out a ton of neuroscience-related, lower impact, less interesting journals that I literally have never looked at. I’d be more interested if they looked at the top X impact factor journals and see how the citations break down; even though impact factor isn’t perfect, it should help capture the fact that tiny, obscure journals obviously aren’t going to get articles cited very frequently.</p>
<p>Also, I have consistently heard that frequent publications in no-name journals is a detriment for hiring and promotion decisions, not a benefit. Again, in neuroscience, if you can’t get a single article in Journal of Neuroscience or Journal of Neurophysiology (good but not spectacular journals, impact factors of 8 and 4 or thereabouts), but have a ton of publications in journals no one has ever heard of, people will seriously question the quality of your work. You will not get hired or promoted. That’s not to say smaller specialty journals are terrible, but the idea is that consistently producing quality work should land you some publications in larger journals, even if your work is on a relatively niche interest. Maybe other fields don’t see this is as much, but over-publication of under-quality articles is certainly not a positive in my experience.</p>
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Authors citing their own work?</p>
<p>I suppose so. I guess I was more surprised because to me, 4,500 journals seems like they’re really scraping the bottle of the barrel and looking at journals that no one ever reads. Maybe that isn’t the case, I’m not sure. Self-citation is a good way to get some of those kinds of papers cited, I guess!</p>
<p>Thank you for posting that, Sakky.</p>
<p>Interesting article. :)</p>
<p>That’s truly remarkable that an article can go five years without being cited. I have cited in the past articles just to refute points in them :D</p>
<p>Why aren’t more people from the general public more interested in read such scholarship?</p>
<p>I find them to be highbrow and challenging reads.</p>
<p>Therese, you clearly didn’t read the article, and you already have a thread on this topic. Don’t revive year-old threads.</p>