Restrict researchers to one paper a year, says UCL professor

When many successful scientists boast dozens, even hundreds, of research papers to their name, calls for more “quality over quantity” in publication can appear to ring rather hollow.

Now a former president of the British Science Association has suggested a radical proposal to combat this problem: restricting researchers to just one scholarly paper a year.

Calling for a “slow science” revolution, Uta Frith, emeritus professor of cognitive development at UCL, said a new consensus about “doing less but better” was needed to address the “information overload” created by the relentless pressure to publish.

Writing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Professor Frith says it is time to “ask ourselves what good does the glut of fast-appearing publications do for science”, particularly as publication output would be “swelled in the future by reports of null results and replication failures”.

“The most provocative of my suggestions is to drastically restrict…the number of papers anyone can publish per year. Personally, I would aim for just one,” she writes.

Reflecting on how her own career, in which she has authored or co-authored some 351 publications, according to her institutional profile, the autism expert admits that she had produced “papers that I wish I had not published because they are not sufficiently original or methodologically robust”.

“I think it is important to tell young researchers about this regret and make them aware that in time they might feel similarly,” writes Professor Frith, who adds that a “scientist’s reputation in the long run will be built on their best publications and lessened or even undermined by their weaker ones”.

That is unlikely to be a view shared by some of academia’s more prolific researchers, with a handful of scholars managing to publish the equivalent of almost one research paper a day.

Analysis by Times Higher Education found that the world’s most prolific scholar between 2016 and 2018 was Tasawar Hayat, professor of mathematics at Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam University, who published 996 articles. In the UK, Gregory Lip, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Liverpool, co-authored 548 peer-reviewed papers in this three-year period, according to Elsevier’s Scopus database.

Speaking to THE, Professor Frith acknowledged that her proposal was “utopian” but voiced a hope that it might start a debate on whether the “relentless increase” in article publication seen in recent years was desirable.

“There must be a trade-off between quality and quantity,” she said, adding that institutions and funders should “look at publication quality, rather than quantity”, when awarding positions or grants.

Professor Frith said she recognised that an annual limit of a single research paper might be difficult for some disciplines, particularly those scientific areas where papers often have numerous authors, allowing researchers to publish dozens of times a year.

However, she suggested, fewer authors could be listed on such papers, with a more detailed postscript explaining the specific role of contributors, rather than designating them all co-authors. “Science is increasingly a team pursuit, but I think we should be acknowledging contributions in a different way,” Professor Frith said.

In her article, Professor Frith also suggests that the number of grants that any researcher can hold at one time could be limited.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com