‘Easier ways to get a publication’: the problem of low quality scientific publications

Readers of Andrology who receive a ‘hard copy’ of the journal by mail, a diminishing proportion of our readership, but that is another story, will perhaps notice that this issue of Andrology is thinner than many issues. Since the inception of Andrology, one of the recurring challenges of the editors is to fill the quota of pages allotted in our contract with the publishers with high-quality manuscripts that have undergone rigorous peer review and been deemed worthy of publication. One would not expect this to be a difficulty, given that Andrology was actually the result of the merger of two journals that together had a greater page count than the new journal, Andrology. However, while ‘wait-and-see attitudes’ and other issues have contributed to a lower number of articles being published than expected, perhaps the real challenge is something else entirely, a result of the fact that this journal continues to strive for meaningful, rigorous scientific studies written in clear and concise formats that facilitate the possibility of improved male health care. Andrology has not only maintained the quality standards set by Journal of Andrology and the International Journal of Andrology, our predecessors, but we have strived to raise the bar and assure that the journal becomes the recognized leader in the publication of male reproductive health care. In the current publishing environment, there are far easier ways to ‘get a publication’ than undergoing rigorous peer review and accepting the inevitability that not all manuscripts can or should be published, but perhaps this simple statement highlights the major problem itself, the mentality of ‘getting a publication’. Most of us have been asked to provide a letter of recommendation, sit on a tenure committee, or consider an individual for a position or honor. Evaluations are often performed well, including an assessment of the quality of research performed, but unfortunately, there is a pervasive attitude throughout science that the number of publications an individual has is an indicator of the value of work the researcher is providing. We all know it is a poor marker, but the mentality is pervasive and we sometimes fall for it. Thus, over time, the reason for scientific publishing has changed from a largely altruistic motive of conveying scientific advancements to a more mundane motive of ‘getting a publication’, be it for advancement, recognition, or just plain and simple avarice and ego. Most of us have more than once heard the comment, ‘It's another few lines on the C.V’. Numerous prior studies have shown that the system is broken, to a large degree, and the symptoms include the avalanche of ‘predatory journals’ that bypass any semblance of real scientific peer review and publication (Sarewitz, 2016; Vogel, 2017). In a recent editorial, Brian C. Martinson commented on this ‘get a publication’ mentality: ‘A dirty truth pervades academic publishing: we write papers to get credit in an academic marketplace. Almost a quarter of a century ago, academic worthies lamented that scholarly publications had become the ‘the coins academics must use to get through the tollgates on their way to academic promotion’ (Rennie & Flanagin, 1994). The purpose of authorship has shifted. Once, its primary role was to share knowledge. Now it is to get a publication –‘pubcoin’ if you will. Authorship has become a valuable commodity. And as with all valuable commodities, it is bought, sold, traded, and stolen. Marketplaces allow unscrupulous researchers to purchase authorship on a paper they had nothing to do with, or even to commission a paper on a topic of their choice. ‘Predatory publishers’ strive to collect fees without ensuring quality’ (Martinson, 2017). The ‘get a publication’ mentality has accelerated due to changes in technology and the marketplace, such as the advancement of online publication, in itself a boom to the advancement of knowledge, but in the hands of those without scientific integrity a valuable tool to facilitate easy publication, usually for a nice fee. A recent estimate is that there are at least 8000 such predatory journals publishing nearly a half million papers a year (Shen and Bjork, 2015). Unfortunately, the system has become a vicious cycle in which more access to publishers has led to more papers published, which has inflated curriculum vitae, which has led to more avarice to ‘get a publication’, which has led to more low-quality submissions resulting in more demand for reviewers, which has caused lower access to quality reviewers (for journals that even attempt to provide quality reviews), which has led to less rigorous reviews, which has led to a decline in the quality of published manuscripts, which has led to more demand for publishers, and around and around it goes. Is there a solution to the problem? One proposal has been the use of metrics assessing the ‘quality’ of a publication, such as the number of citations of a given paper, but while this may be a tool that helps in solving the issues, numerous deficiencies and potential negative unintended consequences in this type of tool have also been highlighted (Schmid, 2017). Another more radical idea has been the proposal to limit the number of publications, or words, a researcher can redeem in a career (Martinson, 2017). This is an intriguing idea that aims at incentivizing high-quality, meaningful research and streamlining the length of publications, both of which are provocative and potentially helpful, but not without possible negative sequelae. Yet another proposal, available in Andrology, is the development of system by which reviewers can be credited for their valuable service, a worthy and useful development (Carrell & Rajpert-De Meyts, 2013). We, as editors of Andrology, continue to monitor and consider such dramatic proposals, some of which may enter the publication mainstream in the future. However, in the meantime, we will continue forward with three simple ideals for us as a journal, and as a community of andrologists: