IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0166149.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Quantity and/or Quality? The Importance of Publishing Many Papers

Author

Listed:
  • Ulf Sandström
  • Peter van den Besselaar

Abstract

Do highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers? Or do high productive researchers mainly produce a sea of irrelevant papers—in other words do we find a diminishing marginal result from productivity? The answer on these questions is important, as it may help to answer the question of whether the increased competition and increased use of indicators for research evaluation and accountability focus has perverse effects or not. We use a Swedish author disambiguated dataset consisting of 48.000 researchers and their WoS-publications during the period of 2008–2011 with citations until 2014 to investigate the relation between productivity and production of highly cited papers. As the analysis shows, quantity does make a difference.

Suggested Citation

  • Ulf Sandström & Peter van den Besselaar, 2016. "Quantity and/or Quality? The Importance of Publishing Many Papers," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(11), pages 1-16, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0166149
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166149
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166149
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166149&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0166149?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Zhang, Lin & Liu, Xinhai & Janssens, Frizo & Liang, Liming & Glänzel, Wolfgang, 2010. "Subject clustering analysis based on ISI category classification," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(2), pages 185-193.
    2. Abramo, Giovanni & Cicero, Tindaro & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2014. "Are the authors of highly cited articles also the most productive ones?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 89-97.
    3. Per O. Seglen, 1992. "The skewness of science," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 43(9), pages 628-638, October.
    4. Koski, Timo & Sandström, Erik & Sandström, Ulf, 2016. "Towards field-adjusted production: Estimating research productivity from a zero-truncated distribution," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 1143-1152.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bornmann, Lutz & Williams, Richard, 2017. "Can the journal impact factor be used as a criterion for the selection of junior researchers? A large-scale empirical study based on ResearcherID data," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 788-799.
    2. Koh Yamamoto & Takuo Yasunaga, 2022. "A percentile rank score of group productivity: an evaluation of publication productivity for researchers from various fields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(4), pages 1737-1754, April.
    3. Pentti Riikonen & Mauno Vihinen, 2008. "National research contributions: A case study on Finnish biomedical research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 77(2), pages 207-222, November.
    4. Per O. Seglen & Dag W. Aksnes, 2000. "Scientific Productivity and Group Size: A Bibliometric Analysis of Norwegian Microbiological Research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 49(1), pages 125-143, August.
    5. Juan A Crespo & Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín & Javier Ruiz-Castillo, 2012. "The Citation Merit of Scientific Publications," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(11), pages 1-9, November.
    6. Bornmann, Lutz & Mutz, Rüdiger & Daniel, Hans-Dieter, 2010. "The h index research output measurement: Two approaches to enhance its accuracy," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(3), pages 407-414.
    7. Javier Ruiz-Castillo, 2013. "The role of statistics in establishing the similarity of citation distributions in a static and a dynamic context," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(1), pages 173-181, July.
    8. Fasolo, Barbara & Heard, Claire & Scopelliti, Irene, 2024. "Mitigating cognitive bias to improve organizational decisions: an integrative review, framework, and research agenda," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 125404, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    9. Kong, Ling & Wang, Dongbo, 2020. "Comparison of citations and attention of cover and non-cover papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    10. Bonaccorsi, Andrea & Haddawy, Peter & Cicero, Tindaro & Hassan, Saeed-Ul, 2017. "The solitude of stars. An analysis of the distributed excellence model of European universities," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 435-454.
    11. Mario Pagliaro, 2021. "Purposeful Evaluation of Scholarship in the Open Science Era," Challenges, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-11, February.
    12. John N. Parker & Stefano Allesina & Christopher J. Lortie, 2013. "Characterizing a scientific elite (B): publication and citation patterns of the most highly cited scientists in environmental science and ecology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 94(2), pages 469-480, February.
    13. Christoph Bartneck & Servaas Kokkelmans, 2011. "Detecting h-index manipulation through self-citation analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(1), pages 85-98, April.
    14. Martins, Francisco Leonardo Bezerra & do Nascimento, José Cláudio, 2022. "Power law dynamics in genealogical graphs," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 596(C).
    15. Ludo Waltman & Nees Jan Eck, 2012. "A new methodology for constructing a publication-level classification system of science," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(12), pages 2378-2392, December.
    16. Young-Ho Eom & Santo Fortunato, 2011. "Characterizing and Modeling Citation Dynamics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(9), pages 1-7, September.
    17. Gutiérrez-Nieto, Begoña & Serrano-Cinca, Carlos, 2019. "20 years of research in microfinance: An information management approach," International Journal of Information Management, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 183-197.
    18. Giancarlo Ruocco & Cinzia Daraio, 2013. "An empirical approach to compare the performance of heterogeneous academic fields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 97(3), pages 601-625, December.
    19. Gad Yair & Nofar Gueta & Nitza Davidovitch, 2017. "The law of limited excellence: publication productivity of Israel Prize laureates in the life and exact sciences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 299-311, October.
    20. Pedro Albarrán & Antonio Perianes-Rodríguez & Javier Ruiz-Castillo, 2015. "Differences in citation impact across countries," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(3), pages 512-525, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0166149. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.