Researchers write a lot of papers. In 2023, for instance, 8,616 papers were posted to the Quantum Physics (quant-ph) section of arXiv.org alone, plus an additional 3,310 cross-listings from other categories. Among all those papers were some really good ones to be sure — but I tend to think we’d be better off without most of them.
The reason why researchers write so many papers is clear: there are strong incentives. Researchers are rewarded for writing lots of papers and punished for not writing enough of them. If you want to ensure that your tenure application is denied, don’t write any papers! There’s also the issue of assigning value to papers (which often means noting where they were published and nothing more), but when decisions get made and resources get allocated, there’s no denying that you’re better off with a longer CV.
The fact that modern research is so highly specialized is a contributing factor. Most research papers aren’t understandable to most people, even to other researchers working within the same discipline. As a computer scientist, I’d be hard-pressed to understand all but the tiniest sliver of computer science papers. Likewise, most computer scientists wouldn’t understand the papers I wrote. Yet, we’re forced to judge one another as researchers. I served in roles that required me to do this — assigning numerical scores to my colleagues’ research performances over some period, for instance — and it doesn’t take very many people on a list to make it completely infeasible to dig in and really understand what they’ve done. As a result, publication venues become like a form of currency and you count’em up.
There are obvious shortcomings to this focus on quantity. For one, there’s an expectation for researchers to serve as editors, program committee members, and reviewers, which means time and energy invested into papers others write. The more papers there are, the less attention each one gets, resulting in a lower quality review system. A focus on quantity also clearly incentivizes lower quality papers, where each one tends to receive the minimal amount of work and/or the minimum number of ideas needed to get it published, and then it’s on to the next paper. Sometimes a single idea or technique gets spread out over multiple papers — not unlike a TV show spreading its plot over too many episodes. I’m not saying that everyone operates this way, but this is often how the game is played. And of course, this all fuels a publication industry that exploits researchers and then charges their institutions for access to papers, adding essentially zero value in return. Don’t even get me started on this.
Having left academia, there’s no longer any pressure at all on me to publish papers — and all I can say is that I’m quite happy to no longer be involved in this system. So no, I won’t review any more papers — but rest assured that I won’t be submitting any for publication either. Given that I reviewed probably ten times as many papers as I ever wrote, I hope we can call it even.
I don’t have a solution to the problem, I just think it would be great if there were an effective way to incentivize quality over quantity — to make people more likely to write papers with lasting value that are truly worth studying. I mean, I’m sure very few people know how many papers Claude Shannon wrote, and it really doesn’t matter at all. What matters far more is that with one paper he changed the world. Of course, most of us won’t reach that pinnacle of excellence — but shouldn’t that be what we strive for?