Related papers: Plea to publish less
Experience plays a critical role in crafting high impact scientific work. This is particularly evident in top multidisciplinary journals, where a scientist is unlikely to appear as senior author if they have not previously published within…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
Scientific publishing systematically filters out negative results. We argue that this long-standing asymmetry has become an urgent problem in the era of large language models, which inherit the positive bias of the literature they are…
Empirical evidence demonstrates that citations received by scholarly publications follow a pattern of preferential attachment, resulting in a power-law distribution. Such asymmetry has sparked significant debate regarding the use of…
Researchers are more likely to share notable findings. As a result, published findings tend to overstate the magnitude of real-world phenomena. This bias is a natural concern for asset pricing research, which has found hundreds of return…
'Publish or perish' is an expression describing the pressure on academics to consistently publish research to ensure a successful career in academia. With a global pandemic that has changed the world, how has it changed academic…
Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than…
There has been a long history of research into the structure and evolution of mankind's scientific endeavor. However, recent progress in applying the tools of science to understand science itself has been unprecedented because only recently…
At what level should government or companies support research? This complex multi-faceted question encompasses such qualitative bonus as satisfying natural human curiosity, the quest for knowledge and the impact on education and culture,…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
The scientific community discourages authors of research papers from citing papers that did not influence them. Such "rhetorical" citations are assumed to degrade the literature and incentives for good work. While a world where authors cite…
Researchers or students entering a emerging research area are particularly interested in what newly published papers will be most cited and which young researchers will become influential in the future, so that they can catch the most…
Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…
Scientists and inventors set the direction of their work amidst an evolving landscape of questions, opportunities, and challenges. This paper introduces a measurement framework to quantify how far researchers move from their existing…
Measurement is a complicated but very necessary task. Many indices have been created in an effort to define the quality of knowledge produced but they have attracted strong criticism, having become synonymous with individualism, competition…
Today's scientific research is an expensive enterprise funded largely by taxpayers' and corporate groups' monies. It is a critical part in the competition between nations, and all nations want to discover fields of research that promise to…
There is growing concern over the potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Publishing scientific research can facilitate misuse of the technology, but the research can also contribute to protections against misuse. This…
Authorship of scientific articles has profoundly changed from early science until now. While once upon a time a paper was authored by a handful of authors, scientific collaborations are much more prominent on average nowadays. As authorship…
A leading explanation for widespread replication failures is publication bias. I show in a simple model of selective publication that, contrary to common perceptions, the replication rate is unaffected by the suppression of insignificant…
We describe a simple model of how a publication's citations change over time, based on pure-birth stochastic processes with a linear cumulative advantage effect. The model is applied to citation data from the Physical Review corpus provided…