Credit: Getty
In my fourth year as a postdoctoral researcher, in 2005, I published ten papers. This was an enormous output for one year. At that rate, I reflected, I could publish 100 papers in a decade. Nevertheless, a century still seemed a remote and unattainable score, something that only the most distinguished professors were likely to achieve before they retired.
Fast forward two decades, and ten papers per year now looks pedestrian when you consider the growing number of hyper-prolific authors who publish more than 60 papers annually1 — one or more papers a week.
I have always felt the pressure to publish more. In 2005, my head of department often exalted a professor who published around 40 papers a year; those of us working in public health were all encouraged to do the same. The target was numbers, and quality was mentioned only in terms of a journal’s prestige, never the work itself.
‘Radical change’
I’ve decided to push back on the pressure to publish by making a rule for myself: I will no longer publish more than seven papers per year. I’ve published a median of 15 papers a year for the past five years, so that means I will have to halve my output.
Seven is my own threshold, and will have no relevance to most other researchers, especially those in other fields or at different career stages. The purpose of setting a number is only to aid the goal of prioritizing quality over quantity.
I am not going to spend less time on research, or contribute to 15 papers per year and then select the best 7, so this change will double the amount of time I spend on each paper. I’ll use that time to craft better papers, doing more background reading, more consultation with stakeholders and more model testing, and giving more consideration to what the results mean for public health in practice.
I am making this change because I think the current publication system is a runaway train that is headed for disaster. Publication numbers are ballooning, with more than 1.7 million indexed articles appearing on the PubMed database for 2024, compared with around 1.2 million for 2014. This inflation was recently described as “unsustainable” by Cambridge University Press, UK, which called for “radical change”. The boom in numbers is putting the publication system under enormous strain2, and it is now impossible for scientists to thoroughly read and peer review the literature. Without adequate scrutiny, the overall quality of research seems to be degrading, with a recent explosion in the number of low-quality papers passing peer review3.
As a professor with a permanent contract, it’s much easier for me to make radical changes than it is for early-career researchers, who are competing to win jobs and funding. Too many career decisions are based on CV length rather than quality, which maintains the pressure on researchers to publish as many papers as possible. Some researchers have reacted to this pressure by using shortcuts to boost their CVs, including using large language models (LLMs) to write low-quality papers and buying ready-made papers from paper mills.
I’m not the first to suggest that less is more in publishing. In Nature in 2017, there was a call for a lifetime word limit for all scientists, and there is a growing ‘slow science’ movement. Alas, speed is still more prized than rigour, because those who publish first get more kudos than do those who publish carefully.
