title: Researchers' Individual Publication Rate Has Not Increased in a Century.
abstract: Debates over the pros and cons of a "publish or perish" philosophy have inflamed academia for at least half a century. Growing concerns, in particular, are expressed for policies that reward "quantity" at the expense of "quality," because these might prompt scientists to unduly multiply their publications by fractioning ("salami slicing"), duplicating, rushing, simplifying, or even fabricating their results. To assess the reasonableness of these concerns, we analyzed publication patterns of over 40,000 researchers that, between the years 1900 and 2013, have published two or more papers within 15 years, in any of the disciplines covered by the Web of Science. The total number of papers published by researchers during their early career period (first fifteen years) has increased in recent decades, but so has their average number of co-authors. If we take the latter factor into account, by measuring productivity fractionally or by only counting papers published as first author, we observe no increase in productivity throughout the century. Even after the 1980s, adjusted productivity has not increased for most disciplines and countries. These results are robust to methodological choices and are actually conservative with respect to the hypothesis that publication rates are growing. Therefore, the widespread belief that pressures to publish are causing the scientific literature to be flooded with salami-sliced, trivial, incomplete, duplicated, plagiarized and false results is likely to be incorrect or at least exaggerated.
authors.affiliation: Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), 1070 Arastradero road, Stanford University, Palo Alto, 94304, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Fanelli
authors.affiliation: École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal C.P. 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC, H3C 3J7 Canada and OST-CIRST, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada.
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Larivière
mesh_terms: D001319:Authorship; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D011642:Publications / Q000266:history* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012108:Research Personnel / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012586:Science / Q000706:statistics & numerical data