The zounds of useless papers are not the problem, it’s the contradicting requirements on journals.
The many papers you’re not interested in are increasing noise making it hard to find papers you’re interested in. I hear you. Not even mentioning the marginal benefit of the papers as such. On the other hand, would you recognize an important paper from your domain of expertise but not your specific set of fields?
I wouldn’t... High quality papers can be a noise as well, if they’re not within your set of fields. This is why there are so many journals - one of their functions is to narrow down the content you must sweep through before finding what’s interesting for you. So one only has to deal with noise from within one’s own set of fields. But even that is too much today.
Possible solution?
Even more selective and/or niche journals. Ok, but here another problem arises for the journal - minimal audience and thus no chance for the journal to survive in the long run. Its IF will be miniscule and acceptance rate very high - the very metrics that journals are judged by will become the sources of its demise.Since incentive systems of the majority of universities pushes academics to publish in high IF and low acceptance rate journals. So the interests of academics and the academic system are completely contradictory.
- What academics want: Niche (and thus low IF) journals with as many papers they’re interested in as possible
- What academic system wants: High IF publications
My guess is, this is exactly why the acceptance rates of the most popular journals are very similar - between 16 and 20% (see photo below).
That’s a very narrow range. But it’s a necessity for journals to maintain it there to satisfy the two contradicting requirements:
1. Not making noise so strong that the journal would lose its audience.
2. Accepting enough papers in hope that some papers get enough citations to help grow journal IF.
But hey, there are journals with low acceptance rates AND high IF. How did they get there? Most likely, these exceptions by luck and/or personal connections published a critical amount of highly cited papers early on. Pushing a snowball down the hill.
Since then, the snowball of ‘high prestige’ has been rolling down the hill on its own.There is no solution that will satisfy both fronts. Even if this part of the incentive system wasn’t against the personal interests of academics.
A balanced approach is a highly customizable filtering and/or alert option in journals, or, even better - a tool that aggregates papers from authors you’re interested in, topics & keywords, and type of papers.
Would you use such tool?
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