Plea to publish less

TL;DR

The paper argues that the exponential increase in scientific publications does not correspond to a proportional growth in impactful discoveries, leading to issues like overproduction and compromised scientific integrity, and calls for community action.

Contribution

It highlights the discrepancy between publication volume and scientific impact, and discusses potential solutions to address the resulting ethical and quality issues.

Findings

Publication growth exceeds impactful discoveries since mid-20th century

Overproduction leads to predatory journals and plagiarism

Proposes community-driven solutions to mitigate problems

Abstract

Recent research\cite{fort} has shown that in the 20th century there is an exponential growth of the number of published scientific papers, but new ideas has only a linear growth with time. The 19th and the first half of the 20th century saw major scientific discoveries. But from the second half of the 20th century, the number of publications far exceeds the number of impactful discoveries. Does an exponentially growing number of publications indicate an element of pathological research? Pressure to publish a large number of papers has led to the phenomena of overproduction, unnecessary fragmentations, overselling, predatory journals (pay and publish), clever plagiarism, and deliberate obfuscation of scientific results so as to sell and oversell. This is harming the healthy scientific culture of passion driven research. It is an urgent problem which needs attention of the whole of the scientific community. Some ways to mitigate these grave problems are discussed.