A good alternative has been suggested. Marcia Angell, deputy editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, and DeWitt Stetten, of the National Institutes of Health, have independently suggested that a ceiling be placed on the number of works a committee considers in making promotion and grant decisions. Angell has proposed that a peer-review board examine "only, at most, the three articles the candidate considers to be his or her best in any given year, with a maximum of perhaps ten in any 5-year period. Other publications should not even be listed." (Annals of Internal Medicine 104, February 1986, 262.) Stetten has suggested, "Let the applicant select, say, one dozen of his bibliographic citations that are most meaningful to him." He added, "in this regard it may be pointed out that … nomination to membership in the National Academy of Sciences requires a selective bibliography of no more than 12 ...
Opting Out of the Numbers Game
As a long-time student of the scientific journal, I have witnessed incidences of unwarranted co-authorship, repeated publication of the same work, and the practice of "salami science"—the slicing of a single research project into its least publishable units. In large part, such behavior by authors can be ascribed to a growing and long excessive pressure to publish in great quantity. This pressure has also been cited as contributing to recent, notorious cases of scientific fraud. Unfortunat
Written byEugene Garfield
| 3 min read
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