On productivity, big multicenter grants, and paper-mills: the pursuit of an academic career leads to scientific progress?.

We are in the time where big multi-centre projects with an ever-increasing number of scientists involved seem to multiply, and single scientist projects seem to die, apart from the happy island of ERC funding in Europe (probably NSF career funding in US?). I believe that with ERC funding and the direct call of ERC winners some European universities have taken a path of excellence to follow, while on multicentre big money projects they are less effective.

In Italy there are those like Mr. Paleari, former president of Rectors, who proposes on sole24ore that thanks to ordinary funds and the Recovery fund, universities are returning to pre-crisis levels but the drop in incoming students requires collaborations and federations, i.e. a model for which we all work together you get better results.

But are we sure? Cavero & Cáceres (2014) have already demonstrated that “the real productivity of researchers has decreased throughout history”. The reason for this decrease is the average number of authors per paper, which has grown significantly and is currently three (that is, 10 years ago).

One of the founding fathers of bibliometrics, Derek De Solla Price, already spoke about the decline of single-author papers in the 1960s (I attach the figure below). In my opinion, papers with a single name remain the most beautiful!

Einstein's annus mirabilis works (1905) certainly had a single name.  He was working not even for a University, let alone a big multicenter grant!    The first paper explained the photoelectric effect, and was the only specific discovery mentioned in the citation awarding Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.  The second paper explained Brownian motion, which established the Einstein relation and led reluctant physicists to accept the existence of atoms.  The third paper introduced Einstein's theory of special relativity, which used the universal constant speed of light to derive the Lorentz transformations. The fourth, a consequence of the theory of special relativity, developed the principle of mass–energy equivalence, expressed in the equation E=mc^{2} and which led to the discovery and use of atomic energy decades later.  These four papers, together with quantum mechanics and Einstein's later theory of general relativity, are the foundation of modern physics.

Leonardo da Vinci certainly worked alone.  Jim Rice in his best and famous papers worked alone.  The best papers in mechanics have at most 3 authors. 

Nobel prizes are given to at most 3 people!   And for a good reason.

Certainly my papers with a single name are the papers of which I am most proud. My most cited paper, viceversa, is a review paper with almost a hundred authors, which I think distracts the reader and carries no interesting information at all!

Strangely, Price is not mentioned in the Cavero & Cáceres (2014) paper. I believe it is also complicated to separate the "publish or perish" driver from the trends highlighted in the paper from the one deriving from the growing need to collaborate to combine different skills (the interesting aspect is that research has globalized before the economy).

In parallel to this, there are other studies that argue that research is becoming less breakthrough (Park et al, 2023). I'll point out a few sentences to you. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology. We attribute this trend in part to scientists' and inventors' reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge. Even though philosophers of science may be correct that the growth of knowledge is an endogenous process—wherein accumulated understanding promotes future discovery and invention—engagement with a broad range of extant knowledge is necessary for that process to play out, a requirement that appears more difficult with time. Relying on narrower slices of knowledge benefits individual careers, but not scientific progress more generally.

There is a big competition between publishers, the number of papers is increasing exponentially. 

In this blog, Geoffrey Boulton and Moumita Koley argue that establishing fair and transparent standards in science publishing is vital for maintaining the integrity and credibility of scientific research, which significantly impacts global society.   To pursue an academic career, especially in non top Universities, you may be tempted to publish in journals which lack proper editorial oversight, lack rigour and integrity, or even engage in fraudulent practices.    Only few journals observe the most basic of scientific essentials, that evidential data and metadata for a truth claim should be exposed in parallel to a published paper, and agreed standards for overall governance of the process are lacking. Science publishing has evolved from a state, half a century ago, when getting into print was the major obstacle, to a current state when almost any article can find a publisher. The major current challenge is TO BE READ!

Secondly, the business models of commercial publishers are based on appropriation of scientific output which is then sold on to readers’ institutions at levels of profitability in excess of 30-40% a financial barrier to readers or authors or both that particularly penalizes those in low- and middle-income countries where public funding for science is limited. This fractures the global scientific community.

Publishers are putting together AI teams to eliminate or control paper mills.  But other publishers remain in the shadow. MPDI has been accused in the past of being predatory journal: a nice post to read is here. For those who don't want to read the whole thing, the conclusion is “So, is MDPI predatory or not? I think it has elements of both. I would name their methods aggressive rent extraction, rather than predatory. And I also think that their current methods & growth rate are likely to make them shift towards more predatory over time.   This is also the reason why I stepped down recently as EiC of a MPDI journal, and from all MPDI boards where I was in.

As a conclusion, the strong pressure for academic career may lead you to succed if you publish a lot, with many collaborators may lead to desperately search for more multicenter big grants, and thousands of collaborators, but  is all this leading to scientific progress?  And what about breakthrough real discoveries?

Of course, these concepts apply mostly to theoretical breakthrough, than to experimental or numerical efforts which do require big teams to be conducted to completion.

Attached the image and an italian original version of the post.

References

Cavero, J. M., Vela, B., & Cáceres, P. (2014). Computer science research: More production, less productivity. Scientometrics, 98, 2103-2111.

https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/universita-top-organici-professori-ordin...

https://council.science/blog/more-is-not-better-the-developing-crisis-of...

Price, D. J. D. S. (1963). Little science, big science. Columbia University press.

Park, M., Leahey, E., & Funk, R. J. (2023). Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature, 613(7942), 138-144.

AI Vakis, VA Yastrebov, J Scheibert, L Nicola, D Dini, C Minfray, ... Modeling and simulation in tribology across scales: An overviewTribology International 125, 169-199