Does Quantity Make a Difference? The importance of publishing many papers

TL;DR

This study investigates whether highly productive researchers are more likely to produce top-cited papers, finding that increased publication quantity positively correlates with producing highly cited work, despite concerns about irrelevant publications.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking researcher productivity to the likelihood of producing highly cited papers, using a comprehensive Swedish dataset.

Findings

Higher productivity increases chances of top-cited papers

Quantity of publications correlates with research impact

No significant evidence of irrelevant publications dominating

Abstract

Do highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers? Or does the increased productivity in science only result in a sea of irrelevant papers as a perverse effect of competition and the increased use of indicators for research evaluation and accountability focus? We use a Swedish author disambiguated data set consisting of 48,000 researchers and their WoS-publications during the period of 2008 2011 with citations until 2014 to investigate the relation between productivity and production of highly cited papers. As the analysis shows, quantity does make a difference.