The strain on scientific publishing
Hanson, Mark A. (University of Exeter. Centre for Ecology and Conservation)
Gómez Barreiro, Pablo (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
Crosetto, Paolo (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Brockington, Dan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)

Fecha:	2023
Descripción:	46 pàg.
Resumen:	Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was 47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hostingspecial issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.
Nota:	5 figures, 2 tables, 15 pages + references. Full-res figures at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24203790.v1
Derechos:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra, i la creació d'obres derivades, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials i que es distribueixin sota la mateixa llicència que regula l'obra original. Cal que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Lengua:	Anglès
Documento:	Working paper

Adreça alternativa: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884v1
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2309.15884

46 p, 4.5 MB

El registro aparece en las colecciones:
Documentos de investigación > Documentos de los grupos de investigación de la UAB > Centros y grupos de investigación (producción científica) > Ciencias > Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA)
Documentos de investigación > Working papers