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Priorities in academic publishing: quality vs quantity
A recent Twitter exchange got me thinking about academic publishing again. It seems to me that much of the current debate about peer review, publication bias and open access boils down to a conflict between quantity and quality, and I have a favourite: quantity.
Quality (the problem)
This is why we have peer review, to ensure that only the good stuff gets published. Clearly this doesn’t work, but I do still feel there is a place for peer review; not in the selection of the ‘best’ papers, but in the filtering-out of erroneous work. In the UK, the REF, and by extension universities, encourage quality over quantity. I have often heard school heads and research group leads trumpet the need for fewer, higher-quality papers. No wonder, if that’s what brings in the money.
Quality is important, for sure (even if our ways of defining quality are weak). However, in my opinion, these incentives are totally unnecessary for ensuring quality. The reason an economist might give half their right thumb to publish in American Economic Review over any other journal is not simply because of quantifiable career benefits and employability. No doubt the prestige gained (or the envy induced) is a sufficient incentive.
Quantity (the solution)
Isn’t this what current campaigns are striving for? We want to reduce publication bias through the publication of uninteresting or negative results. We want datasets and detailed methodologies made available. Yet academics are encouraged not to waste their time on these things and instead strive for that publication in AER/Science/Nature/NEJM. We want academics to stop prioritising prestigious journals with unscalable paywalls, yet this is exactly what they are currently incentivised to do.
Incentives for quantity should be appended to my previous suggested solution to the problems of academic publishing. The REF should reward quantity instead of quality, for example. Some research suggests that academics face a quality/quantity trade-off, while others suggest that the two may go hand-in-hand; no doubt this depends on the field of research. Nevertheless, a re-alignment of incentives towards quantity and away from (self-sustaining, immeasurable) quality would surely be better for academia as a whole.
Blogging disclaimer
So I’ve decided I’m going to start blogging here, on my own site. This calls for a brief disclaimer.
The blog will be an edited version of my daily scribblings. Edited to be intelligible, but not necessarily intelligent. The content will range from thoughts on health economics to music and book reviews and also, no doubt, to the occasional bit of polemical nonsense. I do blog elsewhere and you will find my writings on other blogs to be of a higher standard. Far less thought has gone into what you’ll read here. Its purpose is to allow me to practise my writing, and by making it public the hope is that I might receive occasional feedback on my ideas that I wouldn’t otherwise get.
To summarise: please don’t judge my credibility as an academic on what you see here.