FLICKR, ROBERT CUDMORECitations are often used as one measure of research quality. Established researchers who publish more papers are more likely to see those papers widely cited, information scientists at the University of Montreal and Leiden University in the Netherlands have found. In their study, published today (September 28) in PLOS ONE, the authors reported a different trend among researchers who published their first paper in or after 2009. Members of this less-established cohort were more likely to have top-cited papers if they were less-productive authors (had published 15 or fewer papers), but those less-established authors who had more than 30 papers had fewer papers fall within the top 1 percent of cited papers in their fields.
Analyzing the publication and citation records of more than 28 million researchers, the study’s authors provide a window into whether policies that incentivize researchers to publish as many papers as possible lead to higher-quality work—or just more publications.
“I haven’t seen a study as comprehensive and massive, as far as the data, as this one,” Sverker Sörlin, a professor of environmental history at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, who was not involved in the work, told The Scientist. “The take-home message, for me, is that researchers who publish a lot also tend to publish higher-quality work. My assumption is that over the long term, the younger researchers that continue to do research will also conform to this behavior.”
“The results are ...
