Last month I wrote a piece in Nature to announce that I’m going to halve my research output. For me, the reasons are clear. Publication numbers are skyrocketing and are now being supercharged by researchers using AI to write papers. Many papers are now created simply to pad CVs and have no scientific value. The scientific community needs to be careful with the limited resource that is peer review and must focus on quality over quantity.
Below I discuss some reactions to the piece and add some qualifiers for those who will be counting my papers.
Back-log
Firstly, I likely won’t halve my output by 2026, so please don’t “at me” after counting my 2026 papers on 1 January 2027. This is because I was already halfway through many projects and can’t abandon them mid-river. The change in my approach will take time to show in my bibliometrics.
Also, I’m not counting short opinion pieces in my halving. The aim of slowing down was to spend more time on the complex research experiments that need time to do well.
The positive reactions
There’s been some heartening reactions on Bluesky and LinkedIn, and some via email. I liked the phrase “move slow, build things” over Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things”.
I liked this description by Job Fransen of greedy researchers caring only about their CV: “The others still heap their plates with food they’ll never eat at the breakfast buffet.”
There were some researchers who had already slowed down and reported their mostly positive experiences: here and here.
I was made aware of the slow science movement and you can sign up too.
There was a relatively long piece from a Chinese news site that mentioned the Nature blog and our BMJ paper on paper mills in cancer research that I auto-translated. It was good to see some engagement with the problem of poor quality research from a Chinese perspective, as we know that the incentives in China are badly misaligned. However, the reference to our BMJ paper got two of the author names completely wrong, which made we wonder if this was just the “thoughts” of yet another robot.
The negative reactions
I expected more negative reactions, especially as publishing papers is core to the identity of many scientists. However, there were still plenty.
A common negative reaction was along the lines of: “That’s okay for you, because you’re a tenured professor”, I got the same reaction when I removed the journal titles from my CV.
Yes, I am in a privileged position compared to most researchers. But if people at the top don’t drive change then who will?
There’s a pernicious survivor bias in research, as the people who the system suits – or who got lucky – rise to the top. These same people who’ve “made it” are the ones who are most often asked to redesign the system. I’ve been on multiple panels concerned with research assessment and I’ve never met anyone who wants to “burn it all down”. These panels often settle for minor improvements and the old system prevails.
I was accused of being cynical and that I was expecting “the most precarious to bear all the costs of integrity”. The current cohort of early career researchers are facing challenges that I never had to consider. Unluckily for them, they will have to be a part of changing the system.
Another negative reaction was to laugh at my naivety. Science is a blatant competition and I should know that and make sure my students know it too. I simply refuse to toe this line.
Questions from early career researchers
Some early career researchers asked me if and how they could slow down.
I think early career researchers can go slower and prioritise quality over quantity. This approach does have risks, as they’ll need more time for their greater quality to show. My question to them is: do you want to get a job with a scientist who is focused on numbers? If you win the game, you’ll be working for gamers.
I’ve heard some researchers rationalise that they will focus on quality once they feel more secure, but that’s potentially a long time to be playing the quantity game.
Some questions
I had some interesting questions from the always interesting Mark Hooper:
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Did you have to decline any really interesting projects?
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Did you have to decline authorship for any projects to which you made a significant contribution?
At this early stage, it’s “No” to both, although I have had to think more carefully about what new projects to start.
I have already spent more time checking results, including testing search strategies and double-checking a colleague’s estimates.