Avalanche of papers could erode trust in science

An explosion in the number of academic articles being published is unsustainable and erodes public trust in science, a landmark study warns.

The number of academic articles published worldwide rose from about 1.9 million per year in 2016 to a stunning 2.8 million in 2022 – an increase of 47% – despite little change in the number of scientists.

The new study provides detailed analysis of the situation, using data on publisher growth, processing times of articles and “citation behaviours” (articles referencing each other).

It finds certain publishers, such as MDPI and Elsevier, have “disproportionately hosted” the growth – and sets out ways to address the issue.

“Public trust in science depends on science being done properly,” said Dr Mark Hanson, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter.

“That means articles should be properly peer-reviewed, which takes time. It means some articles will be rejected, then either revised and improved or sent back to the drawing board.”

“Our findings suggest that for some publishers that’s not happening.”

“That’s bad for public trust in science because those articles clearly aren’t all being treated with normal standards of rigour.”

Around half of the new papers came from the five large traditional publishers Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer, Nature and Wiley, who increased their yearly output of papers by roughly 61% between 2013 and 2022.

This was achieved by upping both the number of journals in their portfolio and the number of papers per journal.

The remainder of the growth came from newer, for-profit open-access publishers such as Frontiers, Hindawi and Multidisciplinary Publishing Institute (MDPI).

The researchers say that this growth has been enabled by creating “special issues” featuring articles with reduced turnaround times.

Special issues – also called “topics” or “collections” – focus on a particular topic, and traditionally arise from a conference or a pressing scientific subject.

Special issues work differently from normal research. Instead of authors submitting their work for peer review, guest editors are chosen to produce a special issue, and they can invite whoever they choose to write an article.

That is similar to the way things have traditionally worked, but in the new model very few articles are rejected, and peer review happens very rapidly.

The study found that MDPI had an average turnaround time of about 37 days, a fraction of other publishing groups. This low turnaround time was highly consistent across its journals.

“From submission to acceptance, you can’t properly peer-review most complex scientific papers in 37 days,” Dr Hanson said.

Impact inflation

The sudden rise in the number of articles published has created what the authors call “impact inflation”.

The “impact” of a journal is based on measures including citations: if a journal’s articles are commonly cited by others, the journal is seen to have a high impact.

That’s important for authors because journal impact is used to determine who gets grants and funding.

The researchers observed widespread year-on-year impact inflation, coming from authors who were gaming the system by excessively citing themselves or their colleagues in so-called “citation cartels.” The issue, says Dr Hanson, is that this risks confusing quality signals.[MH1] 

The new study also reveals high rates of “self-citation” specifically in MDPI journals, which has drastically raised those journals’ apparent impact, even if those articles are not being cited as much by the broader scientific community.

Commenting on how the situation might be addressed, Dr Hanson said: “Researchers face pressure to ‘publish or perish’ to be competitive for funding applications.

“While we highlight some groups, it’s really sector-wide. The funding bodies and regulatory groups will need to step in and define the line, then say who’s gone past it.”

Since the research was first published as a preprint in September, the Swiss National Science Foundation stopped funding article fees for Special Issue articles; the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) released new guidelines on Special Issue article collections that responded to issues highlighted in the study, and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced the end of funding work that does not preprint.

Most recently, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies downgraded the status of many MDPI and Frontiers journals to their lowest quality level, advising Finnish researchers not to publish in those journals, citing Dr Hanson’s work among others in justifying their decision.

The article “The strain on scientific publishing” is published in Quantitative Science Publishing and is available here. The study’s authors received no funding for this work.

This article is a updated version of a previously published article, based on the preprint study.