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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

This is all due to the preverse incentives of modern academia prioritizing quantity over quantity, flooding journals with an unending churn of low effort garbage.

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There are easily tens of thousands of researchers globally. If every one did a single paper per year, that would still be way more than journals could realistically publish.

Since it is to some extent a numbers game, yes, academics (especially newer ones looking to build reputation) will submit quantity over quality. More tickets in the lottery means more chances to win.

I'm not sure though how you change this. With so many voices shouting for attention it's hard to distinguish "quality" from the noise. And what does it even mean to prioritize "quality"? Is science limited to 10 advancements per year? 100? 1000? Should useful work in niche fields be ignored simply because the fields are niche?

Is it helpful to have academics on staff for multiple years (decades?) before they reach the standard of publishing quality?

I think perhaps the root of the problem you are describing is less one of "quantity over quality" and more one of an ever-growing "industry" where participants are competing against more and more people.

Perhaps you have better insight into this, why do you think having the primary incentive for professors/researchers being quantity of papers published is appropriate? Or are you saying that it's simply unfixable and we must accept this? As far as I'm aware, quantity of papers published has no relevance to the value of the papers being published, with regard to contributing to the scientific record, and focusing on quantity is a very inappropriate and misleading metric to a researcher's actual contributions. And don't downplay that it isn't purely a numbers game for most people. Your average professor has their entire career tied to the quantity, from getting phd candidates through in a timely manner to acquiring grants. All of it hinging on quantity.

> [...] way more than journals could realistically publish.

In what sense? If you put it on a website, you can publish a lot more without breaking a sweat.

People who want a dead tree version can print it out on demand.

Publishing in the sense or reviewing, editing, etc. Distribution is the easy part.

Well, but that scales with the number of people.

The scientists themselves are working as reviewers.

More scientists writing papers also means more scientists available for reviewing papers.

And as you say, distribution is easy, so you can do reviewing after publishing instead of doing it before.

The featured article demonstrates that good review may not be a function of the number of reviewers available. I personally think that with a glut of reviewers, there's a higher chance an editor will assign a referee who doesn't have the capability (or time!) to perform an adequate review and manuscripts will be rejected for poor reasoning.

Yes, that's why I am suggesting to 'publish first, review at your leisure'.

Just like what we are doing with blog posts or web comics or novels.

I think the problem with a “publish first” paradigm is that it creates an enormous amount to sift through that is of unverified quality. We’re already publishing ever increasing amounts even with journal gatekeepers.

Replicating research is already difficult. Finding quality research under the publish first approach will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack and I fear considerable research will be wasted on dead ends.

> Replicating research is already difficult. Finding quality research under the publish first approach will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack and I fear considerable research will be wasted on dead ends.

I don't think I ever heard anyone complain that eg Arxiv makes replicating research harder?

Well I guess I'm one, if you expand the consideration between a single arbitrary paper. The operative word in my previous comment is “quality”. Since we operate in the real world with constraints on resources like time and labor, making the haystack needlessly big can become a problem with replication. I want to focus my time on the highest quality papers because they are the most likely to be replicated in a useful manner. There is no sorting mechanism in open publishing so I may waste unseemly amounts of time trying to read and replicate crap. Publishing is far from perfect, but it does help separate the wheat from the chaff. (This point has already been discussed in this thread so I won't belabor the conversation further).

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