Scientific Publications: Moving beyond Quality and Quantity toward Influence

A debate continues on the relative importance of quality and quantity in scientific publication. Recent published correspondence (Fischer et al. 2012) heralds a movement to reemphasize quality research over quantity. Although we certainly agree with the call for quality, decrying quantity likewise poses a trade-off that may ultimately be undesirable for fostering an impactful body of research and advancing science. Instead, we argue for an integrated view of scientific contributions that incorporates elements of both quality and quantity. We describe this view as influence. Quality refers to the standard of something as measured against something similar. In a research context, this is inherently problematic, because it is challenging to make such subjective comparisons. For example, is a single paper published in a “top-tier” high-impact journal, which is consequently likely to be broadly read and cited, a more valuable contribution to a research field than two or more papers published in “lower-tier” journals (Loyola et al. 2012)? Quantity is more straightforward to define, because it refers to the number of publications generated by an individual researcher or a research group. However, simply counting the number of publications fails to provide an indication of the quality of the work. Quality is nebulous, whereas quantity is more tractable, but neither attribute alone provides an adequate assessment of the full value of a scientific contribution.