And, not or: Quality, quantity in scientific publishing (original) (raw)
Fig 1
Sketch of the analysis.
A scientist’s publication record can be depicted by the number of papers published each year and the number of citations each paper has accrued. Our analysis is restricted to those papers published between 1980 and 2006. To evaluate whether or not a scientist experiences a trade-off between quantity (the number of papers published in a given year, indicated by the number of stacked pages) and quality (shown here as the number of citations accrued by those papers for simplicity, and indicated by the number within each page icon), we take each pair of papers and compare the number of papers published in the same year with the number of citations each paper has (A). If the lower cited paper comes from the year with fewer publications, then we call the pair concordant, else we call it discordant. we then look at the number of pairs falling into each category and calculate a correlation coefficient (Eq 1). To reduce potential biases introduced by considering all possible pairings, we can select a summary statistic and only consider pairs of this statistic between adjacent years, e.g. the maximally-cited paper in each year (B). To get an understanding of our expectations for the number of concordant versus discordant pairs, we can take an empirical time-line and randomize the citation counts among an author’s publications and re-run the analysis (C-D). Note that choosing the same pairs in a randomized timeline can result in the same or different relationships between the _p_’s and _q_’s. For each author, we are interested in the proportion of all possible pairings that are concordant. Proportions less than 0.5 correspond to a τ less than 0 and are indicative of a trade-off between quantity and quality.