Fixing the insidious trend to quantity and unethical practices over quality in scientific publications

Abstract Since the advent of online research metrics, which began with Web of Science in 19971, these metrics have been increasingly used to rank researchers and universities2. Over the last two decades, the easy access to research metrics has greatly benefited the academic community and beyond by providing quantitative measures for ranking researchers, universities and departments3,4,5,6,7,8. However, this accessibility, accompanied by a ten-dency to quantitatively evaluate research quality, has also shifted the focus towards practices aimed at enhancing research metrics rather than pursuing high-quality, poten-tially path-breaking research9,10,11,12,13. This trend threatens to degrade global research advancement and invalidate rankings. Here, we demonstrate that an accelerating num-ber of researchers – on the order of 10% or 20,000 researchers on Stanford’s Top 2%14 researchers - are achieving implausibly high-publication and new co-author rates, with many producing tens to hundreds of papers per year, and gaining hundreds to thou-sands of new co-authors annually. Based on an analysis of statistics from Stanford’s top 2% list and Nobel Laureates, we propose a method to renormalise research metrics to better reflect research quality. Our renormalised metrics aim to remove the existing incentive to prioritize quantity or resort to unethical practices to boost their metrics.